So in about four hours, each of us got our essential machinery up and running: I had industrialized Mars and hired tons of colonists, he had gotten out to Jupiter and started setting up shop.

This game is so weird I think because it’s so wide open, a true sandbox. The phases of the game always look about the same: exploration, settlement, race for the endgame. But since each of those stages can go very well or very poorly, you can get wildly divergent pacing.

I like the Mars game because it feels satisfying early, but it’s also a trap because your technical advances are limited. I like the asteroid game more but it relies on luck. The Jupiter game is slow but dominates the midgame headed towards the futures. Everything from Saturn outward seems more like endgame territory.

There’s still so much map, and so many ways to combine technologies, and processes we just haven’t bothered with (freighters, 3d printing in spaaace, combat, hostile recruitment, etc.), it just seems like an impossible game to master in a normal lifetime. No other game in my collection makes me question my actual intelligence so often.