Circulari Board Game First Impressions
Circulari sees you mine on a shifting asteroid field.
BYO robots.
Players must compete and collaborate to make the most of its precious resources. From the comfort of your tabletop, puzzle your way through the shifting asteroid fields and emerge triumphant in this highly interactive board game.
Circulari Game Play
You have 6 asteroid tiles around a 7-sided centre board with a space station on the 7th edge.
Players also have a player board with some cubes representing robots on it. Players take turns which are over 2 phases: Action and Command.
A player can take 1 action, these are:
- Deploy Robots from your board onto an Asteroid
- Use movement points to Move Robots to a different Asteroid, or to a different section of the same Asteroid
- Pay 1 ore and 2 energy to Upgrade your movement points or command channels (Gain a victory point per maxed-out row)
- Pay 3 ore and 2 energy to Export and gain 2 victory points
A player can also pay 2 energy to take a second action.
Once a player has taken their action they can then take a number of Command actions equal to their Command Channel value.
- Shift an asteroid one space around the board for each Robot in the centre layer of the tile
- Extract Ore from an ore-rich asteroid next to the space station for each robot in the ore section of that asteroid, flip it to its waste rock end
- Deorbit a waste rock tile from the waste rock area, all robots on the waste rock end of any tile gain 1 energy. Then, swap the tile for a new ore-rich asteroid and gain a victory point.
When a player gets to 7 victory points, they win
Theme
Space mining! It’s all good.
Setup
Boards out, cards out, cubes out, done.
Components & Artwork
The components are nice. Standard cubes but the recessed tiles are a must when moving them!
The art is OK but the graphic design is very clear and I could learn the game as I play just by looking at my player board.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
It’s a very simple game to learn so I can’t imagine it will be hard.
Everything is open information so you can always help a new player out.
Circulari Summary
Space mining makes me think of Pulsar 2849 immediately. There you’re doing a lot more and there is focus away from just the Asteroids.
Here, it is interesting moving the asteroids around. If I move a Waste Rock asteroid anticlockwise I could be moving your Ore asteroid towards its goal by default. Frustrating 🙂
The problem for me is that it’s too heavy to be fun but not heavy enough to be interesting.
Maybe a 4 player game with all the craziness that would bring would be better?
Jesta ThaRogue
