Spaceteam Card Game First Impressions

Form a fluid Spaceteam and work together quickly to repair your spaceship.

Cards included. BYO communication and listening skills.

Spaceteam is a fast-paced, cooperative shouting card game in which you race to repair your malfunctioning spaceship.

Spaceteam Game Play

There is a deck of tools that makes up a player’s hand. They’re all used in a game so they’re shuffled and divided equally around all of the players. Each of these tools has important info used in the game such as its name, a picture of the tool itself and an icon showing its type in the top left.

Then you set up a deck of cards called the ‘Malfunction Deck’ which also contains some ‘Anomalies’. The number of each of these cards depends on the player count and the difficulty level. Also in this deck are the 6 pieces of the ship you’re trying to build.

This deck is shuffled and again dealt to all players, but this time they’re kept face down with each player having their own pile.

Start!

Players then start a 5-minute timer, flip their Malfunction decks face up and play. Play is simultaneous and real-time performing actions as required.

In the pic above you can see what a Malfunction card looks like. One thing you can do is play a tool card down from your hand to match one of the requirements. Once all are matched, discard the malfunction and return the tool cards to your hand.

Once a tool is played it can’t be picked up until the Malfunction is fixed so it’s important to not just throw down cards just because they match a requirement on your current malfunction.

Of course, you won’t have all the tools you need so you have to ask for them to be passed to you. But, tools can’t be passed directly only to the adjacent player. So if someone across the table has the tool you need it must be passed around the table one player at a time until it gets to you.

The top card isn’t always a Malfunction, there are those Anomalies and repaired ship parts.

Anomalies

When these cards are at the top of the deck, they’re a little different. These have everyone at the table do something a little different. It could be changing seats, touching a card at the same time etc

Some of them just have you take some Malfunction cards from another player’s deck onto yours. Once complete these are discarded.

Systems are Go

There are 6 ship cards in the deck and if you draw one you read it and put it on the table saying “X Systems are Go” where X is the system on the card. This ship is in 6 pieces and is arranged into a 3×2 grid making a complete ship.

Either the timer runs out and the players lose all the ship is built first and the players win.

Theme

It’s good fun. It simulates that frantic shouty teamwork that is required to fix a spaceship… I would guess.

Setup

Deal two lots of cards out to people and that’s it. You have to split the cards into 3 decks, deal some out, shuffle some together and deal those out first.

I don’t like games that do this but it’s OK here. It can take a minute, but for a five-minute game…

Components & Artwork

The cards are plastic which is great. They’re going to get handled a LOT playing this so they either need to be plastic or sleeved.

The iconography is great.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

So, a simple game which is easy to teach I would think. You can keep the difficulty level low for the first playthrough to make sure new people know what to do and what to expect. The game can slow down from an optimum pace with rules questions which is not ideal in this game.

This adjustment of the difficulty level will help to make the game accessible too.

Spaceteam Summary

Realtime co-ops are far from rare with plenty available. Looking at the lighter end I still look to FUSE as a favourite. This also has a lot of shouting and calling out for something like Pit and similar games.

You have to be able to both call out for the cards you need and keep your ears open for what other players want. If you’re selfish or lazy you’re just letting the team down. For every gooblebox you need someone needs the flooblecrank you’re holding.

Ok, so those are from Rick and Morty but it’s good that the card names, images and icons are hard to describe. You can’t just have ‘screwdriver’ because that would be easy…. well, easier.

The anomaly cards are fun and really snap you out of your focus which is great. This ruining of your flow is needed and makes the game more interesting than just passing cards.

This is a very fun real-time game where communication is key and listening skills are a must.

Jesta ThaRogue