Welcome to the Underwater Research Station AquaSphere!
Your team: An engineer, a scientist, six submarines and a bunch of ready-to-use bots.
Your tasks: Discover new types of crystals, develop your lab and keep a step ahead of your opponents!
Your challenges: Time is scarce, your lab size is limited, and annoying octopods keep entering the station and getting in your way!
AquaSphere is a demanding game, rich in variety, which requires careful planning as well as flexibility. With only 7 available actions, Stefan Feld's new hit makes for a fun and challenging gaming experience.
Rondel and Rondel we go... where we'll end up only Feld will know!
If you enjoy Feld games... buy this. Now! The game sounds complicated reading the rules (and explaining it!) but once you start it all sort of "clicks". From programming the robots to capturing squids the almost silly looking pieces all start to make sense as you play the game. After your first game you realize the importance of everything...and how you can never get everything done you need to.
Plus the game has cute squidmeeples!!!
AquaSphere is a great game that seemed complicated as the rules were explained, but once we started the gameplay was actually quite straight forward, leaving the 'real challenge' in the strategy rather than how to play the game (as all good games should be).
The mechanisms of 'time' and 'programming' robots are really good. Another interesting component was that the scoring rewarded you for building subs and having your robots on the board, but robots can be sent back to you, so that can't be your only focus. Likewise you can't ignore it because having robots out without the subs limits your scoring potential.
The three of us that played it each took a different approach and our scores were literally 2 points from first to last for the majority of the game, only the final scoring really separated the men from the boys... the down side to that is that it was me who got greedy and failed, leaving me in last place. The post mortem showed the one or two actions in the final round that I should have done which would have kept me in the running, so it was a really good close game all the way through. Some games suffer from being discouraging when you can see a player has won early on and you feel like you are playing out a foregone conclusion.
Final thoughts are that this was a really good game with some really great components, and intuitive gameplay. If you like worker placement games, this would be a great addition to your collection.
Excellent game. Great depth. The game is a bit limited, in its material and possible strategies (it's not a rich Tzolkin or Terra Mystica). However, what makes this game so good (and fun to play and replay), is its excellent, dynamic way of puzzling your way through it. There is a lot of control (no bag, no dice, no blind cards given to the player. You choose which robot to program, which movement and action to make), but also a lot of dynamic randomness. Everytime, the setup (available cards, labs, crystals, time markers and octopuses in your area) is different. Also the programming sequence (of your robots) is different with each play. So maybe you know what to do (some kind of strategy, there aren't a lot), but can't do that (this game or round). You will have to improvise, to find YOUR victory route, with the most profit and the less cost. Winning or losing this game, doesn't matter that much (which game does ?). I always have a lot of fun when playing it. And that's what I like so much about it. The artwork and material is also great.