SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The rotating solar system board is the thing everyone mentions first about this game and it deserves it, planets physically shift position between rounds, and that single piece of physical design does more thematic work than most games manage with a whole rulebook of flavor text. It genuinely changes what’s reachable turn to turn in a way that feels like actual orbital mechanics rather than a random event card pretending to be one.

Underneath the spinning board is a card-driven engine builder, and the multi-use cards are the real mechanical heart of it, every card can be spent several different ways depending on what you need that turn, which creates the kind of tight, crunchy decision space I look for in a heavier euro. Discovering the alien races partway through a game and having them retroactively shift your available strategies is a nice surprise the first time it happens, though I’ll admit by my third play I was hunting for it rather than being surprised by it.

First play ran us into the four-hour range with four players and a solid amount of downtime between turns, watching someone else’s engine spin up while you wait your turn. That’s the actual dealbreaker for some of my group, downtime that scales badly with player count is death for a weeknight game, and this one asks for a serious time commitment before it clicks. Once everyone knows their own board and isn’t stopping to relearn icons, later plays moved noticeably faster, but that first session is a real toll.

I don’t think I need to own this long-term, it’s the kind of game where a bad round of the card draw can leave you scrambling for pieces to build an engine out of, and there’s real luck sitting inside a game that otherwise wants to feel like pure engine optimization. But every time it’s hit the table I’ve had a good time, and the theme is doing more than I expected from what sounded on paper like just another euro reskin.