MLEM Space Agency (Reiner Knizia)

We picked up MLEM in Julian this week.  Yes, I am easily lured in by cats and nice artwork on the covers.  I think the selling point for me was seeing Reiner Knizia's name on the box.  He was the designer of Botswana and Butterfly Garden, two games that couldn't be more different if they tried.  What would he do with cats and rockets?

When I looked in the box, eeek ... there were way too many little pieces to punch out.  Then I rolled out the big game board and worried it might be too long for our gaming table.  But we stopped worrying and watched a video or two.  Like this one on the BoardGameGeek channel.  They did such a good job explaining it that I could replace all the worry with, "That's all there is?"

So ... over half of those cardboard pieces are just score tokens.  Another third are for advanced rules.  That leaves a big cardboard spaceship, 4 player cards with 8 astronaut tokens each, a little rocket to move on the board, and another little rocket to move on the crash meter at the bottom.

Pick a captain for the first mission, then each player puts one of their astronauts on the ship, and it's ready for liftoff. Each of those 8 pieces has a special ability shown by a symbol.  We started by ignoring those.  Under the hood, this is a simple and colorful game of "push your luck".  Roll the six dice.  The dice have the numbers 1 to 4 and a symbol representing afterburners.  

Next to each space on the map there are dice shown: these are the dice you can use to move from that space.  Sort the rolled dice by their value, then choose which values to use, and you must use ALL dice of that value.  So, if you're on a space that says Burn-1-3 and you roll Burn-1-1-2-2-3, the twos are unusable.  You have one Burn, two 1s and two 2s.  So you can use the 1s only to go 2 spaces, the 2s only to go 4 spaces, or some combination, like Burn-1-1 to move three spaces.  The dice you use are set aside and cannot be used again for this trip, except for the Afterburners, which you can keep.

The way it plays out is that the captain of the current trip rolls the dice, everyone argues over which dice to use, then the dice are spent, the ship is moved, and each passenger (starting with the captain) decides whether to land (bail out) at the current location or not.  Then you can try to go further with fewer dice each time.

At first, Anne would bail out at the first planet every time, but by the end of our second game, it was more like, "I have one die left and a parachute, I'll be fine either way."  If you fail to roll any of the dice you need, the ship crashes, just add one to the crash meter and reset for your next expedition.

The game ends when any player has landed all 8 of their cats, or when the crash meter is full.

For scoring, if you land on moons, you get tokens right away.  For planets, points are given at the end based on which player has the most cats there, with ties broken by which cats got there first. 

It turns out to be really simple.  The dice mechanics are fun and give you a fine illusion of control.  Push your luck, then push it again.  There are some other bonus tokens and details, and the icons on the astronaut chips really matter, but those are the basics.

The advanced rules are also simple.  Just play with the base game first, and these things will fit right in if you want to use them.  

One set of tokens is the Exploration set.  These are ovals that go on the landing spaces and add extra actions like Move Forward 4, Gain a Die, or Score 1-4 points to the captain.  

The next set is the Secret Missions set, where you start with 4 chips for each player, return one and keep the other three -- these give you planets you need to visit.  At the end of the game each player gets points based on how many of those goals they met.

The last set is the UFO set, which I didn't study in detail yet.  It looks like a big UFO piece gradually comes down from the top end of the play mat, affects how many dice are available, and does some other odd things.

That's a short version of MLEM.  It was intimidating at first but turned out to be cute and playful.  We really appreciated that the designer did not force all the details and options into the base game.  So we could start with just the push-your-luck game and add the other layers when we were in the mood for them.

We made it to the top of the map in game two with the additional booster chips.  And Anne's pink cat had the icon to score double points for reaching the far reaches of Space 

MLEM is a winner.