SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

I unboxed SETI on a night I’d spent most of the day setting a fox’s ears with pins so they’d dry pointed forward instead of flat, and I mention that only because both jobs share the same lesson: little pieces, done wrong, ruin everything downstream. The box on this one is heavy in a way that promises real production, and mostly delivers, though the layout of components across the table gets tedious fast once you’re managing satellites, tech cards, and a rotating universe that keeps repositioning the thing you built your plan around.

That rondel is the actual engine of the design and it’s a good one, planets sliding along a track so the action you wanted three turns ago isn’t where you left it. First play is overwhelming, everyone says so, mine included, but by the second game it clicks the way a good field-guide index clicks once you’ve used it a dozen times. The aliens are the part I keep coming back to. You don’t know what you’re getting until you get it, and unlike a lot of “random bonus” mechanics they’re not filler, a decent alien card can be a real chunk of your endgame score.

Where it earns real skepticism is the multiplayer-solitaire complaint, and I’ve felt it myself, there are stretches where I couldn’t tell you what my neighbor did on their turn and it wouldn’t have changed mine. One review put it about as well as I’ve seen it put: swap the theme for chicken breeding and nobody at the table would notice, and there’s some truth in that, even though I don’t personally think a thin theme sinks a strong system. At four players the runtime creeps toward the four hour mark and the waiting between turns starts to grate, which is the same math I run on every long euro before I bring it to a weeknight table.

The tech tree and card-play interaction is where the real depth lives, tight resource-driven actions that reward planning two or three turns out. I’d call this a strong two or three player game that gets noticeably worse company at five, and box weight aside, it’s the kind of thing that rewards the second play a lot more than the first.