I think Spaceteam is a kind of amazing game, though I doubt I’ll have much to say about it. There are way too few cooperative multiplayer games out there, which is one of my favorite play styles; the game play is charming and holds up for a surprisingly long time given its basic simplicity; the pacing and challenge level is well done.
And everybody likes it: I wasn’t surprised that my coworkers liked it, I wasn’t surprised that Liesl and Miranda liked it (and liked it enough for Miranda to ask repeatedly to play it over the next several weeks); I wasn’t even surprised that my father enjoyed playing it when we roped him into a game over Christmas. What I wasn’t expecting was for my father to ask to play it again a couple of other times over his visit; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him ask to play a video game before.
There probably are real lessons here about project organization, too: the way people have to avoid stepping on each others’ toes, the way you negotiate priorities, the unspoken agreements you end up with to support all of that, and the ways you handle blame.
And then there are the credits.
So: a wonderful game. Just not one that I have much to say about!
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I have Spaceteam on my list of games to write about over the next few weeks. However, I want to actually play it again before I commit to an extended opinion and I haven’t more than a single person I know in my local area who has it. That, if I write one thing about the game now, is both its greatness and problem: it’s all local.
It can make for amazing sessions as people play together to create a virtual space within a physical one, but can also mean that it limits when the game is played too. Most of my circle of friends are in different timezones now. Local play, as we have both written about, can mean very different things to different players.
1/25/2013 @ 10:13 am
Yeah, “It can make for amazing sessions as people play together to create a virtual space within a physical one” is spot-on. I hope you write about that!
For what it’s worth, Spaceteam is a quite different game with three people than it is with two people. (But it’s fairly similar with three people and with four.)
1/26/2013 @ 11:09 am