Solarquest - is it just space Monopoly?

Solarquest always felt like space Monopoly to me, and it's hard not to make that immediate comparison.  The property cards are near perfect clones of the ones in Monopoly, you roll two dice and move, you pay some kind of rent when you land on properties owned by opponents, and pick cards with good and bad outcomes.  But there are plenty of differences.  The board is much more interesting -- it has more spaces and the extra challenge where you can't escape from a planet's gravity well if you don't roll high enough.  The need for fuel is a constant pain, but you get to build fueling stations on your own properties and can buy fuel from some generic spaces or from opponents when you land on their spots.  So the fuel acts a bit like the hotels in Monopoly except that you can buy as much as you need, or as much as you can afford, and you always seem to be low again a few moves later.  Spaces that are not planets or moons do not cost fuel to leave.  

Of course I was the banker AND the realtor AND the fuel monitor.  I don't mind running all the numbers and money for these games, it just speeds up play.  I make one or two blunders per game, but I try to keep it moving along.

About those Red Shift cards, you only pick a card when you roll doubles, and they can actually be helpful, by sometimes sending you past Go! (I mean Earth) to collect your $200 ($500 in Solarquest), and sometimes the cards let you move 20 or 30 spaces while only burning a few units of fuel, so if you're low on cash, getting those big boosts to get closer to Earth (payday) are handy.  After putting a few cards back at the bottom of the deck like a normal game, we started dropping the used cards on the sun to imagine burning them up.  Why not?  It's space. 

Landing on Earth (it's not called Go!) you get twice your normal salary, which I think is a house rule in Monopoly but a core rule here.  I added a rule where you also get one new fueling station each time you pass Earth, but I guess the rules say you can buy one for $500 at any time, so my rule was just to jump start the learning session.

It felt like there was a good balance of move and purchase options and obstacles. I may have had the fuel rules wrong the last time I played about 15 years ago, because back then we just ran out of fuel and the game was over.  This time we ran out of time and decided that the game would end the next time someone passed go -- which comically happened by drawing a Red Shift card two moves later to zoom around the board and end it.  We're not in super competitive mode, so we didn't bother counting all the stuff at the end.  The journey was entertaining enough.  I had more cash, but Anne had more properties. No point grinding through the numbers for a winner.

Even in mid-game it's hard not to make Monopoly jokes.  The cheap moons around Jupiter were like Baltic Avenue and I had no idea Venus was so expensive (Boardwalk) until I was the proud owner.  I think Anne would have gone bankrupt at about the 40 minute mark, but I gave her a $1000 discount if she gave me Pluto, which completed a set and became a headache for her later on.  Why not?

Some of the prices were annoying, like a rent that was $255.  We usually end up skipping the small change in these kinds of games -- who cares about the $5's?  It was funny how many times we could not escape a planetary system and had to go around again.  By the way, Uranus has 10 spaces around it.  I spent so much time there, I memorized it.  Another 10?  No point moving, I'm just going to end up HERE again.

It had good ups and downs and was fun to explore.  I looked over the additional rules and don't think they would add much, certainly not the rules for laser fire where you could spend fuel to get a shot at damaging another player or knocking them out of the game entirely.  With two players, that could just cut the game off at the knees.  No thanks.  Maybe it would be a good additional with 4 or more players.

I will ponder this a bit in my head and see if I can think of other details worth expanding on ...