While the experts cautiously pronounce extraterrestrial life on exoplanet K2-18b, we here actually long since discovered extraterrestrial life during a game: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A board game completely devoted to the discovery of extraterrestrial life and even better, I don’t have to be shot into space to conduct such research, I can do it from the comfort of home, because even though 124 light years away “the strongest signs of possible extraterrestrial life so far” may have been discovered; for me it only gets qualified as intelligent, if they also play board games!
SETI is a one- to four-player eurogame coated with, as it is almost the norm nowadays, a very thick theme, and in this case space exploration. The goal of the game is to score as many points as possible while shooting probes from Earth toward planets or their moons, hoping to discover extraterrestrial life. You and your research team must manage this in a time frame of five rounds, but that’s more of a question concerning time. Each player has a player board which is sort of your home base, to improve your technologies and not least, analyze your collected data.
During your turn, you perform one action at a time, which is nice for your fellow players, but like a good Euro, that one action can cause a chain reaction and you still have a long wait. There are no less than eight different actions, plus a few free actions, but most of them follow one another, so there is some sort of logical order to your choices. For example, you can’t “orbit a planet” if you haven’t launched a probe yet.
Other actions include landing on a moon, scanning stars for data, analyzing that data, playing a map, improving one of your technologies on your player board or if you can’t fit anything else, and with that you’re done this round until everyone is fitted. The important thing, though, is to collect as much data as possible from nearest galaxies and analyze it for those strong signs of alien life.
Visually SETI is more than well put together and it just looks really cool, most of the parts are made of thick cardboard and in addition a lot of high-quality (recycled?) plastic parts. A nice detail is that the playing cards, which you can use in different ways in the game, refer to all kinds of existing projects and illustrations concerning the exploration of the great unknown, such as the Mars Exploration Program, the ISS space station and the James Webb Space Telescope. All include informative text at the bottom of the map with what is depicted on the map.
The three-part game board looks beautiful with our sun at its center and where planets from our solar system circle around it. Surrounding our solar system is a previously undiscovered score track. With the planets board on one side, where everything happens to land on planets and moons. On the other side of the solar system you then have a dashboard with place to keep track of rounds and your popularity, also here are the various technology tiles. Your player board is finely double layered, so your data and technology do not shift.
You can label SETI among the Expert games though, or as I would say myself, a nice Heavy-Euro. In short, that means that SETI is a game “that takes a while to get into.” The first game will therefore probably take more than two hours, but once you understand the various actions and their connection after playing once, SETI is well worth the time invested! Actions follow each other in quick succession and give you the feeling that you are really progressing in your quest.
What’s unfortunate about that quest is that it doesn’t really get exciting, you do build towards it, but it’s pretty obvious that something is going to happen after you’ve analyzed enough data and if not this turn, then the next. Knowing that this is a Eurogame doesn’t really detract from the game otherwise. In addition, you should also not purchase SETI if you only like light games, but if you are ready for some more challenge in your collection, you will get it with SETI.
SETI is a thematically strong, deep and beautifully executed game. It’s super cool to make the choice, stay close to Earth by studying Mars or Venus, or go further away to possibly rake in more points during your investigations on Neptune or Uranus and I love raking in points! Again, a very nice production by Czech Games Edition.
Now you might be thinking; where is that alien life in your story? But that is something you have to discover for yourself! So if you’re ready to search the stars for life, SETI is a mission you don’t want to miss.
