Game Preview: Carpe Astra: Seize the Stars

By W. Eric Martin
November 10, 2008

Publisher: Reiver Games
Designers: Ted Cheatham & Jackson Pope
Players: 2-4
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 30-90 minutes
Release Date: November 2008
Price: £22
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Carpe Astra grew out of a friend’s request for a favor, according to co-designer Ted Cheatham. Said friend in Cincinnati had recently completed law school and, wanting to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina, he asked Cheatham whether he knew anyone in the area. Cheatham, who is a member of the California bar but not a practicing lawyer, says that he didn’t know anyone in that town, but he was sure that someone he knew would. “I made a few calls on his behalf and thus started what I love to call (as I have looked for many jobs) the job networking process,” he says. “This got me thinking about the whole network process, and it is really how the game was born.”

That vision of the insurance guy contacting a lawyer, who called a doctor, who emailed someone else, and so forth was at the heart of Networking, as the game was originally called. The connections were represented by offset squares that touched six neighbors. Says Cheatham, “They were squares for two reasons: First, I thought it was unique and no other game really took that format; second, it is heck to cut out hexes.”

Cheatham sent the game to Jackson Pope at Reiver Games, who had been looking into becoming a full-time publisher while simultaneously expressing a desire to cut out lots of hexes. Together, the two designers worked on the scoring, the game play, the setting, and everything else about the game. The final result, Carpe Astra, has players trying to build connections between different guilds – Traders, Priests, Military, etc. – in a crumbling Empire, with those connections giving you support toward a seat on the Galactic Throne.

The gameboard, which differs in size depending on the number of players, is composed of guild tiles that resemble two attached hexes, with a different guild on each half of the tile; each player has a homeworld adjacent to a single guild tile, thereby giving them immediate access to two guilds. Players start with five credits, five agents in their color and two network cards from a deck of 35; each network card depicts the two or three guilds that must be connected to your homeworld in order to score. A separate deck of 35 slander cards is also used, but to slander someone you must connect the depicted guilds with an opponent’s homeworld instead of your own.

You create connections for both network and slander cards by placing and moving your agents among the various guilds on the board. At the start of the game, you have one agent in your homeworld and four agents in waiting. On a turn, you can pay money to filter cards in hand, pay to add another guild tile to the gameboard, place or move two (or more) agents, rotate existing guild tiles, score network or slander cards (if possible and desirable), then refill your hand. Scoring a network card lets you claim a guild support token for one of the guilds pictured on the card; scoring a slander card strips support for one guild from the player being slandered – although if you pay a coin, you can keep the token for yourself as a reward for bringing the opponent’s nefarious actions to light.

After each player has taken a turn, players who made connections – whether positive or negative – with the guild(s) pictured on that round’s event card are rewarded with money or network/slander cards. Event cards for the next couple of rounds are face-up, allowing you to work toward those bonuses, but sometimes emergency situations arise which force a new event card on players. Alas, the universe isn’t always predictable.

Carpe Astra ends after ten rounds, then players score points based on their standings in the guilds, with tied broken by whoever has the most money.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Prototype
Times played: Six, with 2, 3 and 4 players

Even though I’ve played Carpe Astra a half-dozen times, I feel like a novice at the game as it’s changed in multiple small ways since my first play in May 2008: the cost for swapping cards in hand has changed, as has the cost of placing a guild tile; you can now rotate the guild tiles; you can no longer place an agent on both halves of a guild tile; a blind-bidding-based bribery system that allowed you to convert an opponent’s agents to your own – a system in which only one in ten bids was interesting – has been eliminated; the scoring systems has gone through multiple iterations.

All this and more has happened since that initial game at the 2008 UK Games Expo, and all of the changes have seemingly made the game better. (I say “seemingly” as I’ve played only once with the finished rules.) By restricting placement to one-half of a guild tile, players are less able to turtle on their section of the gameboard. By lowering the costs of cards and tiles, players are hampered less by chance elements and have more opportunities to develop a plan and carry it out. By replacing the bribing with a cost-based placement system, in which you pay to move or place more than two agents on a turn, the game plays more quickly and has more interesting decisions because your movement options are greatly expanded.

The heart of Carpe Astra – dude placement and multiple temporary goals – remains identical to that first game, and that’s the intriguing aspect from my point of view. How do you hit those targets while leaving yourself flexible for future turns? Can you hamper an opponent while leveraging yourself closer to the throne?

Although the scoring system has undergone multiple changes, consistent throughout the process has been a ceiling on the level of support that one player can obtain from any guild. This design element gives slander its appeal as without it you’re blindly treading water and waiting for the shark attack that will come. At a certain point in the game, you can’t improve the number of supporters behind you, so you must instead bring out the negative campaign advertising and blast away at opponents to increase the distance between them and you. Other players are doing the same thing, of course, but paying attention to the events and their bonuses can give you a clue as to how others might choose to strike at you.

Icons for the six guilds

One drawback to the game for some people will be the interchangability of the guilds. The character of the guilds adds flavor to the network and slander cards, but only in the supplemental text – not in your choice of actions during the game. The Military, Priests and so on all play the same, so it doesn’t matter who you are and which guilds you control – only that you have a stronger power base at game’s end than anyone else. I don’t do somersaults for theme, but given the possibility for how it could have been used, the absence seems worth a mention.

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