LogFAQs > #934029449

42. Celestia (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Push-your-luck
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 8-12 games over 8-12 sessions with 5-6 players (2016-2019), incl A Little Help expansion
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 20/80 (2018)

Summary - An airship is voyaging into the land of Celestia, and the further it goes, the more valuable the loot. Everyone on board gets to take turns piloting it. One problem though: there are hazards to overcome at each stage (which the pilot encounters by rolling dice.) The dice represent challenges the pilot needs overcome (i.e. discard cards from hand) in order to progress - else, the ship crashes. Everyone gets to decide at each stage whether to stay on (except the pilot, who must stay on). Once the ship crashes, it just starts right back up again.

Design - Celestia is a simple game by decisions. Your decision is influenced by your tolerance for risk, how likely you are to become pilot again, and whether you think the current pilot has good cards. But it always boils down to "am I in or out?" For any game with such simple decisions, it needs to be super-fun.

And for the most part, Celestia succeeds at that. The chrome helps - each player is represented by a little pawn that physically goes inside an airship. The airship physically progresses down a straight line, which looks super-cute and kinda intrepid/badass. When you roll the dice, everyone must announce "I'm in!" - possibly in rapid succession. The dice themselves feel great. Plus, the game plays at an incredibly rapid pace given the simplicity of the decisions, which keeps you moving along, and everyone is invested - either positively (if you're still on the boat) or negatively (if you're off it) - in whether the pilot succeeds each mission. And you can villainously toss down a few Take That cards as well just to be a jerk.

Experience - I've had a lot of fun playign Celestia. Just moving down the track feels good, as well as animatedly declaring whether you're in or out. That said, I want to discuss two issues I've had with the game.

First, when I started out, I made the mistake of playing one rule wrong: you're supposed to roll the dice before letting people decide to stay in or get out. I actually liked it better when you didn't have that info, even further simplifying the decision (to "am I feeling lucky?" as opposed to "oh no way you got that man"). Second, playing with the expansion worsens the game in my opinion. Asking for "help" slows the game down and adds nothing in terms of fun, and those cards randomly can clog the deck.

Future - While I don't own Celestia, at least two of my gaming friends do. I've seen the entirety of the decision space of Celestia, but there's still space to have positive experiences with it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness