LogFAQs > #985843829

#07 - SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
My Score: 8.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/418059/seti-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence

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Me and my own friend played SETI on the second day in the hot games room. This was with a couple who owned the game and had played before multiple before with just the two of them. They really liked the game but wanted to try it with a larger player count as they had only played with just the two of them.

Luckily they were experienced with the game to teach us cause this is a fairly complex game. For full disclosure I am generally a fan of heavier games, typically around the 3.5-4.0 weight on BGG is my sweet spot, but there are some exceptions. I do like lighter games as well, as seen by my other entries but if I'm planning a board game night I'm usually looking to have the main game be around that weight. But usually for these heavier games I am the one learning (usually watching a Watch it Played video) and teaching the game, so it was nice to have someone else explain it.

So yea, we played it with 4 people, and I believe we started at around 8:30 and probably finished around 11 pm so it took about 2 and a half hours with the teach. I thought it was a good length for the type of game it was and didn't feel like it overstayed it's welcome.

So Seti is the fairly typical play a set number of rounds, whoever has the most victory points after the end game calculations is the winner. I will say this is a high scoring game from my experience of one game, I had like 160ish points and finished in second by a large amount. First place had over 200 points.

Since this is a very heavy game I will do my best to give an overview of all the major mechanics without going too in depth into the minutia, but this will still be a long explanation.

So the first thing to talk about is the main board. The main board is dynamic and changes every game and is basically meant to be a pseudo map of the solar system, with the sun in the middle, and various layers of rings around it. The inside ring has earth, venus and mercury, the next one has mars, then saturn and jupiter, and finally neptune and uranus. The on an outside ring you can't actually go to is four sets of 2 "sectors" that are basically other galaxy. So another way you can view it: in the middle is the sun and around it is four rings split into 8 octants with a "sector" at the end of each octant.

So I said the map is random, and that's not just the sector placement, but the rings themselves as well. The first through third rings all move at various points, with the inside ring moving always, the second ring moving 2/3ds of the time and the third ring moving 1/3rd of the time. This is meant to represent that the further out planets take longer to rotate around the sun, and it also means that planets that aren't on the same ring will become closer and further apart as the game progresses. The rings that are rotating are also not the entire ring, there's usually like 2-3 gaps out of the 8 so as they rotate the spaces in those gaps will change (because you are revealing through the gaps). The main other thing on the map other than planets is asteroids but I believe there's a few other things as well. If you want to see what a random setup can look like you can check their randomize site to get an idea https://seti-solarsystem.czechgames.com/