Andromeda's Edge

I came into this one having already logged a few plays of Dwellings of Eldervale, same designer, and Andromeda’s Edge is close enough to it structurally that I kept catching myself reaching for the wrong term at the table, worker instead of ship, dwelling instead of station. It’s area control and denial layered onto worker placement layered onto an engine you build out of modules, and the engine building is the part that actually shines here in a way it didn’t in the fantasy version. Even a player who’s clearly behind on points has a shot at a real comeback through the engine clicking late, which isn’t something I could say about the honor track in Rising Sun.

The faction abilities are where I’d put my one real complaint. They’re not close to balanced against each other, some clans are quietly doing twice the work of others, and while that’s survivable in a game with real engine variance, it’s the kind of thing that shows up more the more you play it, not less. A few of the deluxe pieces are also, and I say this as someone who doesn’t usually care about component upgrades, sloped in a way that makes them a pain to actually pick up off the table.

Setting that aside, the return-to-station action is doing more design work than it looks like, it’s the biggest chunk of downtime in the game but it’s also the most rewarding single action to pull off yourself, which is a neat trick, making your slowest turn also your most satisfying one. The dice-based battles carry real interactivity for a game that’s mostly euro underneath, and the raiders roaming the board add a threat that doesn’t care whose turn it is. It plays well at two, which surprised me given how area-control-heavy it looks on the box. I’d take this over Dwellings now, and I don’t say that lightly given how much table time the original got from me first.