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KeeperSpace Base Review
8.4/ 10- Played 77 times on this shelf
- 2–5 players · best at 3
- 60 min
- Medium weight
The box has been on my shelf longer than I like to admit, but the first time I played in a long time was this past July 25, and in the two months since, Space Base has quietly become the game I open on Board Game Arena more than anything else. Thirty-five logged games. Nearly all of my plays have been online, the exceptions being a few recent games with my sons around a real table, back on the 25th. Since then it has been a regular for me on BGA.
The idea is simple enough to teach in a few minutes. You have a row of twelve sectors, numbered one through twelve, each holding a small starting ship. On your turn you roll two dice and choose: activate the two sectors that match each die, or the single sector that matches their sum. Then you can buy one new ship from the market, and it slides into the sector with its number. The old ship that lived there doesn't leave. It gets deployed, tucked up above your board, and from then on it pays you when that number comes up on somebody else's turn.
That last part is the whole game for me. Most dice games leave you waiting while other people roll, hoping the table moves quickly back to you. In Space Base every roll belongs to everyone. A seven on my opponent's turn might hand me two credits and a point, and the better I've built, the more of the table's luck ends up flowing my way. I keep thinking about the old Stoic line that we control our choices and not our fortune. The dice here are pure fortune, and yet the game asks a question the Stoics would have liked. What have you done, before the roll, so that whatever comes up is useful to you?
The pacing matters too. Credits reset up to your income at the end of each turn, so you never hoard. You spend, you build, you watch the market, and the race to forty points sneaks up faster than it seems it should. The early game is all small cheap ships and a feeling that nothing much is happening, and then around the middle something clicks. Your fours and nines are paying on every turn, not just yours, and the game starts to feel like a machine humming in the next room.
Online, the machine runs itself. Board Game Arena hands you your deployed rewards the instant a number comes up, and you barely notice. At a real table it's different, because somebody has to notice. Somebody has to watch every roll, even the ones that aren't theirs, and call out what they're owed. I think that makes it a better game in person, even if it's a faster one on a screen.
Now for the record, which flatters me, and I know it. Across those 35 games I won 28, which is 80 percent. Broken down by table size it gets more honest:
Two players: 6 wins in 6 games. Three players: 18 wins in 21 games. Four players: 4 wins in 8 games.
Against the opponents I log as BGA 1, BGA 2 and BGA 3:
BGA 1, 31 games together: I won 25, they won 2, and someone else took the other 4. BGA 2, 23 games together: I won 16, they won 3, someone else took 4. BGA 3, 18 games together: I won 13, they won 2, someone else took 3.
I don't read too much into those numbers. They're seat labels more than people I know, and I suspect some of those players were learning the game while I was already well into it. The four-player number is the one I trust. With more people at the table, everyone's deployed ships are firing on more turns, the market moves faster, and the edge you build gets thinner. Four wins in eight is roughly what a good game against good players should feel like.
A note for anyone who ends up where I am. John D. Clair, who designed Space Base, has a new game out with Ian Hutchison called Electrify, published by AEG. It's an engine builder about running a power company in a solar-punk world, which sounds like exactly the thing a Space Base fan would want to try next. It's funding on Kickstarter right now through October 16, and it's already live on Board Game Arena, so you can play a few games before you decide to back it. There's even a Space Base promo card tied to it, and mine is on the shelf with the rest of my Space Base.
Verdict
8.4/10. Space Base is the rare dice game that keeps you leaning in on everyone's turn, and after 35 plays I'm still finding new ways to make a bad roll pay. It shines at three and holds up at four. What stays with me is the picture of that row of twelve little ships, half of them quietly working for me while someone else holds the dice.
