Space Alert Board Game First Impressions

Space Alert is action programming set to the voice of a robot overlord…

Make sure you wiggle that mouse!

Space Alert is a cooperative team survival game. Players become crew members of a small spaceship scanning dangerous sectors of galaxy. The missions last just 10 real-time minutes (hyperspace jump, sector scan, hyperspace jump back) and the only task the players have is to protect their ship.

You and your teammates are running around the inside of a ship (that from the outside has the look of Galaxy Trucker) performing actions in order to fend off invaders.

You get dealt a few piles of cards that have 2 ‘ends’… One is to take the action of ‘A’ (Fire), ‘B’ (Activate Shield) or ‘C’ (Do a Thing) and the other is to move left, right or up/down.

Programming

You play a CD (or an app) and it will tell you where you are being attacked from in what stage. The enemy ships that attack you are different depending on the level of the game you’re playing. The harder ships were VERY hard in our case.

Your job is to put the cards on your board, the right way up, to program yourself to move around the ship and perform actions at the right time. Sometimes, depending on your cards, you can’t get to where you need to so you quickly need to make sure someone else can.

Also, sometimes you may need people to shoot at an enemy with two different guns at the same time to deal enough damage so you need to quickly cooperate there too.

When the app ends, you go down a track performing actions in order and you played them on your board.

Space Alert Actions

There is one interesting action once per phase, there are 3 phases that split up the actions. Someone needs to wiggle the mouse in the central room to stop the screensaver coming up! If you don’t, you have to move all of your unactivated actions right one space. This means you might be out of sync with what you have planned.

You’re trying to survive all the actions and fend off the invaders. Some invaders beam on board and you have to move robots around to fight them.

It gets quite hectic as you can imagine for a timed game. But Space Alert is also particularly challenging, with not much room for error.

It’s fun, very different and nice and short. I would play it again.

Jesta ThaRogue