SETI Space Agencies

Game summary

👥A game for 1 – 4 players
⏳Play time around 40 – 160 minutes
🏢Publisher is Czech Games Edition

Introduction

Humanity’s search for alien life has grown more ambitious. With discovery within reach, powerful organizations have stepped in, each brining its own vision, methods and motives. Whether public, private, or fringe, these groups are reshaping how the search unfolds.

Will your organization be the one to make first contact?

Let’s get in on the table

A quick summary of SETI, or in case you want to read our full review: SETI is played over five rounds, you lead a scientific institution tasked with searching for traces of life beyond planet Earth. Players will explore nearby planets and their moons by launching probes from Earth while taking advantage of ever-shifting planetary positions. Decide whether to land on their surface to collect valuable samples, or stay in orbit for a broader survey. Additionally, by directing your telescopes to gaze into distant star systems, you may detect traces of alien signals or undiscovered exoplanets, and collect promising data to examine and study back home.

Back on Earth, you can invest in upgrading your equipment so you can analyze incoming data more efficiently, boost your telescope signal capacity, or increase your supply of resources—all to expand the scope of your search that could lead to a discovery of extraterrestrial life forms. Finding traces of extraterrestrial life is only a matter of time utilize the resources you have at your disposal strategically and you may well end up being the one to make the biggest scientific contribution towards advancing our understanding of alien life within our galaxy.
(thanks to BGG for this summary)

The SETI: Space Agencies you receive new components like quick start cards, organizations etc. but als new alien species to discover and 42 cards just to add for the main deck.

Ready to dive deeper into this expansion?

Let’s play

Let’s first take a look at the the new game components like the quick start cards and the asymmetric organizations.

First there will be a small change for preparing the game, you only prepare the end of round cards for rounds 2, 3 and 4. Set publicity to 0 for all players, then determine the starting player as normal and give each player 2 quick start cards, 1 organization and 4 random deck cards.

Quick start cards and organizations

The quick start cards has to parts, the top half and the bottom half. The top half instruct you to place something like an orbiter, trace or signals. When you have to mark these, you don’t get the bonusses. The bottom part of the card will give you starting resources, points and other cool effects, mostly related to what you’ve marked on top of the card. All players simultaneously resolve there 2 quick start cards.

The organizations have also random starting resources and once per round effect that can be used during the game. Most organizations let you tuck cards for income and gain the resources immediately. At the beginning of the game, you don’t get any income from the organization but you only resolve them at the start of round 3, 4 and 5.

When you play solo or with 2 players, there is some small change. Choose a neutral color and randomly draw 4 quick cards and resolve the top of the cards directly by using the items from the neutral color. In this case you ignore the bottom half of the cards

You can’t use the quick start cards without the organizations or the other way around. They are ment to be to be used together.

Signal Tokens

During the game you can receive signal tokens that you can use during a scan action. When you want to use them, you just discard that token. For each signal token that you discard, you may discard 1 additional card from the card row and mark a signal in the matching sectors. You can’t use more than two signal tokens during a single scan action

New Alien Species
In this expansion, you receive 3 new Alien Species;
Arkhos
Glyphids
Amoeba

What they can or will do, is something that you have to discover during your play ;-). We won’t spoil anything then the things you will see on the pictures. But we are very excited with these new Alien species.

So we now only have to look at the other components that you receive in this expansion. Well the new 42 cards can be shuffled into the main deck (you can recognize them by a small rocket), the aliens can be shuffled with the originals but when you want to discover them directly. Just shuffle them and pick 2 to use during you first games.
The signal tokens are just being add to the game, just place them nearby the game board.

Conclusion & final score

Difficulty: 3.68/ 5
Our score: 9 out of 10 dice

What an amazing expansion this is! With 42 new cards mixed into the main deck, SETI: Space Agencies dramatically increases replayability. More asymmetry, stronger starts and deeper strategy make this feel like an essential addition.

The extra cards and new alien species are fantastic. We honestly can’t get enough of them 😉. But the real highlights are the quick start cards combined with the asymmetric organizations. They make SETI even more enjoyable to play. Thanks to the quick start cards, you effectively skip the slow first round and can immediately jump ahead, whether that’s an early points advantage, multiple scans, or even landing on a planet right from the start.

On top of that, each organization comes with unique abilities and different starting conditions, giving every play a fresh feel and a distinct playstyle.

We own SETI with the Folded Space insert, and so far everything from this expansion still fits perfectly inside the insert.

In short, do you own SETI? Add this expansion right away and your experience will only get better. This isn’t an optional expansion. Once you’ve played SETI with Space Agencies, you won’t want to play without it.

Thanks to Czech Games Edition for this review copy for SETI and the opportunity to write about this expansion.