WBG Score: 9
Player Count: 1-4
You’ll like this if you like: Lost Ruins of Arnak
Published by: Czech Games Edition
Designed by: Tomáš Holek
This is the reviewer’s copy. See our review policy here
In SETI, you’re able to scan for and receive signals from the far reaches of the galaxy, and this technology has always fascinated me. The fact that you can receive signals and images from the depths of space is incredible. Heck, even James Cameron can tweet from the bottom of the ocean. We have all this amazing technology that lets us see and communicate from seemingly impossible places… and yet I still have trouble listening to music while driving through a small village. I’m not saying I want a space agency’s worth of tech, but it would just be nice to listen to David Bowie’s "Starman" while driving through rural England.
How to SETI up and play
Give every player a player board, their tokens in their chosen colour, one of the game's excellent player aids, and their starting income card. The reverse of this card will show you your starting resources, which include 5 cards from the deck, one of which you’ll tuck under your income card, immediately gaining that resource as well as adding to your income every round.
On the board, randomize the setup of the outside ring, then build up the rotating board in its three layers and then randomize its setup either yourself or scan the QR code on the rulebook and get a randomized setup. Lastly, take the five alien races, shuffle them face down, and then place two of them in their slots on the board, still face down.
On your turn, you’ll take one main action and any number of free actions in any order. First, I want to talk about cards. Cards have multiple uses in SETI; you can discard them as a free action for their ability in the top left of the card. As an action, you can pay the cost on it and use the action on it. Some cards also have grey mission abilities, which you play in front of you, and they trigger when the condition is met. There’s a symbol on the top right, which is generally used in conjunction with the scan action. Lastly, the cards can be tucked under your starting income card in the same way as setup to be used for future income turns.
Sending out a probe puts one of your probes on Earth. At this point you can pay energy to move one adjacent space per one spent, or you can spend a card with a move icon on to move round as well, gaining any popularity for any planets you move through. If you're on a planet you can use the orbit action to place your probe in orbit around that planet and gain the bonuses there. In much the same way you can land a probe on the planet which will cost more but the bonuses and points could be better. You can land on the moons around it but you’ll need an upgrade before you can.
The scan action first lets you scan for data in earth's sector. This is where you collect a data token from that sector and replace it with one of your tokens. The collected data goes into your computer. You can then scan in another sector by looking at the coloured corners on the top of the three cards in the display and scanning in one of those sectors and then discarding that card.
You can spend six popularity points to upgrade the actions on your board. Take the upgrade you want, gain the bonus on the back and slot it into the appropriate place on your board. There’s a load of things this tech can do like making landing on planets cheaper, letting you land on moons, letting you put more than one probe out at a time and even improving your scanning. When you gain a tech then you must, in true Numberwang style, rotate the board. Which of the three sections you’ll rotate will depend on where the rotation marker is. Rotate that part one step and then move the rotate token round as well. This will obviously change the alignment of the planets and board.
Adding data to your computer not only gives you bonuses at certain points, including letting you tuck cards for income, but, if you fill your computer with data then you spend an energy, removing the data and gaining a life trace. Throughout the game you’ll gain different coloured traces and when you get one you can put one of your tokens in one of the matching slots below one of the two alien boards. When one has all three slots filled then congratulations! You’ve discovered alien life and the board flips over. Get that aliens rules card, card deck and any tokens from the box . Give a card to everyone who contributed a token (one per token placed) and read out how this particular race works. Each race will have their own deck of cards which work the same as regular cards but are more powerful and may work in line with the aliens rules. The new boards will also have new and more spaces to put trace tokens when you get them. These usually vary in points and may even have a cost to pay before you’re able to place them.
The game will end after five rounds at which point you’ll score any end game goals on cards you played and then score the public endgame objectives.
All of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will - where do you want to start?
As per usual when I write any review I’ll finish the overview and then ask myself “right, where do I start?” This time isn’t any different, except for the fact that this is the exact same question I ask every time I start to play SETI. In fact that’s the one question I kinda dread new players asking me because my answer is always going to be “I don’t know, what would you like to do?” Part of that is me not knowing what the heck I’m going to do, let alone anyone else. It’s also partly because I don’t want them to blame me for accidentally tanking their game on the first turn. I love that that question even needs to be asked because It means that, straight from the off SETI gives you so many potential options and doesn’t follow a linear path every time.
The beauty of SETI is that there are so many paths to explore and it’s up to you which one to choose. Which you choose could purely be because you fancy doing something different from the last game or maybe If you’ve got a hand of cards that synergize well with a particular path, well then, maybe go that way. If you fancy going down a more planetary exploration route this time, go for it! What makes the starting choices all the more difficult is that they’re all good! Even better is that they all interconnect just enough that you’ll need to touch on everything to be really efficient, but can also be separate enough that you don’t necessarily have to go hard down all routes. So if you find that you aren’t scanning as much as other players maybe because, thematically, your agency had to unplug the scanner to plug in the kettle, then it’s not that big of a deal.
It’s on the cards
Yep, I’m an absolute sucker for multi use cards in general and when designing SETI I can only imagine that there was an objective to create cards so multi use that they could coin the phrase, “the Swiss Army knife of multi use cards”. (wonder if I can trademark that?)If this was the case then they’ve nailed that brief. I don't know if this is the most multi use a card has ever been with technically six uses it can give you, but whatever it is, I love them. Not only does it give you those fantastic choices of, “I want to use the card for this later on…..oooh but I this bit could be really handy now” but I love that they’re not only one time use either. The end game scoring serves to give you that extra end game push but the grey triggerable missions act as little side quests to add your game on should you wish to. They can help towards stretching out your turns by giving you little resources boosts. Of course the best bit about multi use cards and these ones in particular, is how they can lead onto some awesome, satisfying combotastic turns.
Some nice Aliens but where are the Quagaars?
Unless all players somehow manage to ignore all the life trace symbols then it shouldn’t be long before you discover the first of the two races of aliens. Each one has similarities to each other in as much that you’ll have coloured areas to place your tokens when you find life traces and open up a new path to scoring victory points. Most importantly is that they'll all play differently and add their own thematic spin to the game without adding a ton of complexity to the. This is a blessed relief when you’ve already been through a decent length of teaching and people have got to grips with the rules. The last thing you want to do is fry their brains with two more vastly different rule sets. These new discoveries will each give you new opportunities to place traces and score points (some come with a cost) and their own unique deck of cards which will be more powerful than the regular deck. I love the idea that you don’t see which two are being put out each game, it adds to that sense of discovery especially when you're just exploring the game yourself but also stops people from planning ahead based on what’s coming. Each new discovery will lead to a change of pace and tactics amongst the players as players either try and adapt to what's been presented or just carry on as they were and plan on touching on the new discovery later…..or wait until the next one.
Each alien race is brilliantly thematic to its own back story. I won’t mention any specifics here as I know some people want to discover them as they come up in the game. But if you don’t mind knowing or want to revisit these as you discover them then it’s well worth watching the specific alien videos on CGE’s you tube channel.
Jupiter Ascending
Speaking of ascending, SETI is a game of escalation. Your first round will probably feel comparatively short with only limited starting resources at your disposal. But as the game goes on and you increase your income, improve your actions with tech and play cards that improve your lot, you'll find your rounds being filled with more options to play with. That being said, SETI does something that I love in games in that it makes you try and squeeze every last drop out of every. This escalates as you reach the last throes of a round and even more so at the end of the game because you don’t want to leave any space rock unturned. You want to go out knowing that you did as much as you could. As much as your round will expand as the game progresses you want more, and so as people get to the end of their round you’ll see them trying to math out every possibility. “If I can just get one more popularly then that gives me one more turn to get a tech, then I can fill my computer with data and that gets me two credits so I can play this card……….” And so the muttering continues. You’ll soon get used to this as a regular occurrence and what previously sounded like your friends are muttering incantations in the hope to magic up more resources, will, before you know it, become background noise. Which is good because it gets worse, especially in that last round. At the same time though I love that sort of puzzle and when you finally crack it, it’s like you’ve actually successfully landed a probe on a planet…..I’d imagine. It won't surprise you to discover that I’ve never set foot near any space agency, which is probably for the best.
We’re gonna science the potato fertilizer out of this game.
As you may have guessed this game can be prone to a little AP (analysis paralysis) as people try to figure out their turns and it’s not necessarily with people who are usually prone to that sort of thing. It just means that some games may work out a little longer than expected which is why I’d say three players is probably the sweet spot, especially when you’ve got all new players round the table but if your group tends to play quick anyways you’ll probably be fine. That being said you may not notice as much downtime as you’ll be too busy working out your own game.
This is less of a negative and more of a tip I suppose? It’s easy to get caught up in a game of follow the leader and my advice will be, don’t. If one player is running off ahead in points because they’re game is based around landing on planets then it’s all too easy to panic, change strategy and do the same thing to try and catch up. In the games I’ve played I’ve found sticking to your guns works much better as things do start to even out if you're playing your own game well.
You spin me right round.
Let’s talk about the big orange orb of heat in the room. Because let’s be honest, it’s a big ol’ gimmick designed to draw people to the table and sell games because it's a cool spinny thing…... .right?…….of course it isn’t (although I don’t think it hurts things) but I can see why it might evoke that response. It’s a really clever, thematic and fun way to add to the puzzle of the whole game and, let's be honest with ourselves, it’s just really cool when we get to spin it round. How often it rotates is dependent on how the game plays out, but it's usually enough that you can’t rest on your laurels and just assume that it’s going to be the same on your next turn. It’s also never constant enough that it’s moving round like you’ve just let your kid take the controls on the teacup ride. It’s not all gloom though because having that one rotation happen between turns might even be an advantage. One turn could be the difference between spending precious resources to get to Mars, to all of a sudden it’s parked itself next to you! It’s such a clever piece of design.
The final countdown.
There’s so much I could talk about when it comes to SETI because I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I love how your choice of tech can go a long way to enhancing the particular path you're taking but again, because you want to try and do a bit of everything, you don’t necessarily want to go all the way on, say upgrading your probes. The scanning has a nice little race element as you fight to keep the majority to gain life traces and points but also collect that all important data to fuel your computer and, with upgrades, resources.
SETI didn’t make my top ten (new to me games) of 2024 because of how late in the year I got it but this has now rocketed into my top ten games of all time and I’m pretty confident in saying that this will be in my top ten of 2025.
SETI is a fun thematic game that floods you with choices and asks the important question “how do you want to play” and more importantly gives you the tools to do so and really, what more can you ask than that?
Right I’m off to try and get a signal and see if I can finish listening to Starman, I need to find out how that bad boy ends.
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