Set in an underwater research station, AquaSphere is a game in which you program robots to prepare for future actions, then move around the board to deploy them. It's considerably more complex than most of the favorites among my group of gamers, though not the most elaborate thing we've played. There are a lot of intriguing ideas thrown into this game, but some of that feeling of complexity comes from the sense that they don't necessarily gel with each other.
For instance, cool idea #1: the way you have to plan ahead in this game. Worker placement games are always like chess, in that a good player will be thinking several moves ahead of where they are now. AquaSphere forces you to think ahead, though, because taking any action requires at least two turns. You have a personal game board on which the different action types are shown. You have to take a turn to load up a robot on a specific action space, then later take another turn to deploy that robot to your location on the main board to actually take that action. Every move you're considering is telegraphed ahead of time to your opponents, and if any opponent also has that particular robot/action already prepped? Well, then they can beat you to the punch. It's a clever way to visualize something that's usually hidden in a game, and get players thinking about thwarting their opponents' plans.
Then there's cool idea #2: There's a side board for preparing actions, a sort of hopscotch mini-game you need to play. You begin each round by choosing one of two spaces in the first row. After that, you hop to one of three spaces in the second row -- but one of those three won't be accessible, because it won't be connected to the space you chose in the first row. Finally, you'll hope to a third row of spaces -- and again, your choice might be limited, depending on where you stepped in row two. Each round, you shuffle up exactly which type of action goes in each space. It's all a clever way of narrowing a player's range of choices, making certain things mutually exclusive to one another, and forcing you to consider what your priorities really are.
Both these two systems are quite clever... but also feel a bit at odds with each other. The narrowing of options by that side board is good for trying to keep the pace up in a complex game. But both systems are about getting you to look ahead, and seem a little redundant to each other in that respect.
There's an interesting curve ball in the scoring, too. Points in the game are scored in fairly large bundles at once. At regular intervals on the scoring track, there are hard lines that you must stop at... unless you spend a particular resource in the game used only for the purpose of moving by the hard line without stopping. It's another "look ahead" element; if you know you've got a large scoring moment coming up, you need to get one of these resource tokens. Otherwise, you may only get partial credit for all those points, when you hit that hard line and have to stop there.
That's an unusual resource in a board game... though it joins an array of other things you also have to think about. Time tokens, spent to move around the station. Octopuses, which build up around the station and must be examined, lest they cost you points for amassing in the parts of the station you control. Oh, yeah -- you also have control in different sectors of the station. And enhance a personal lab board to let you keep more resources on hand. And crystals, and submersibles.
Um... it's a lot. And while the artists did a noble job with it, it's a quite busy bunch of game boards trying to show it all. There are little icons strewn about, trying to remind you which consequences go with which actions -- but they're kind of easy to overlook amid the colorful visuals. There's so much at play that you can't really imagine a board that would make it much clearer... but maybe this makes it a bit harder than it needed to be.
Maybe that's my takeaway from AquaSphere in general. I liked it... but maybe it's a bit harder than it needed to be. No doubt that the complexity would become more natural with more plays. But it's a heavy and long enough game that you'll have to be really devoted to it to want to play it that regularly as opposed to more accessible fare. At least, that's how it's going to go in my group. I could see pulling it out every now and then, and having a reasonably fun time with it -- while being rather confounded all over again each time by the challenging decisions the game presents.
I'd give AquaSphere a B. I like seeing a designer who I love stretch and try more. But Stefan Feld's catalog is so large at this point that there are many other games of his I personally prefer.
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