skymines has a cool mechanic but that’s it
I’ve gotten to play Skymines a few times in the last week or two and I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit.
Though there’s a very interesting hand-management mechanic in the game, this mechanic is not very tightly integrated into the theme of the game, which I think is a shame. However, I still enjoy the game a lot.
hand management
The reason I say hand management is because there is no deck in this game; every card in the game is either in your hand, being played, or in a discard pile. During the first phase of the game, the planning phase, everyone decides simultaneously which cards to place face-down from their hand.
During this phase you typically want to select the cards that work together and have the best synergies, since at first you can only play three at a time. So, you might play resource cards that are the same type since it would let you buy things that are more expensive. You might try to group all of your energy cards together in one play so you can expand a company over the surface of the moon quickly to get a large heaping of benefits.
However, whatever cool combo you manage to pull off gets immediately scattered to the wind. Above your player board are slots for discard piles, one of which you pick up before you spread the cards you just played into separate piles. That cool combo you just played? well, each card is in a separate discard pile now.
This essentially means that, as you discard cards, you’re planning out what cards you’ll have several turns from now, and therefore what kinds of things you’ll be able to do.
the tension
This results in a very fun and interesting tension — you’re trying to find and maintain synergistic combos while the game actively tears them apart. Not only that, but over the course of the game you can unlock the ability to play more cards at once which at first seems so incredible, until you realize that it also increases how spread out your cards are. Did you have a cool four-card combo? Well, now each of those cards are in four separate discard piles.
This game gives me so many moments where I feel like a genius one moment and like a complete klutz another, as a result of my own actions.
I absolutely love this kind of tension because it feels like the harder I try, the harder the game makes it for me to continue succeeding while still offering interesting decisions, and I can appreciate that.
the theme
The theme is also, at least to me, hilarious. It’s much better than the old theme — this is actually a reimplementation of Mombasa which is about expanding trade companies in Africa (and I hope the board game industry continues the trend of no longer making games about the racist and colonial parts of history that no one asked for).
It seems like you’re a stock portfolio manager using crypto currency (cue to the moon jokes) to invest in companies and you can invest in as many companies as you’d like as much as you can.
This results in you trying to engage in as much capitalism as possible, in very comically funny ways.
Since you always get rewarded for the spaces you are able to get the company to expand over even if they were previously owned by someone else, you might find yourself using companies as shells to get the benefit of a particular moon space repeatedly.
Or, you might buy up as much stock as possible only to find at the end of the game that it’s all essentially worthless. STONKS
final notes
Unfortunately, the hand-management aspect of the game doesn’t tie into the theme at all and it’s something that makes this game basically an alright game. However, I love sci-fi enough and the mechanic is novel enough to me that I’m inclined to acquire it for my collection, lest I find a similar game that uses this mechanic more appropriately thematically.
