The other day our local gaming store was doing a demo night. It was supposed to be a Cards Against Humanity demo for any hold-outs who haven’t played it yet, but my hubby and I were the only ones who actually showed up. So instead, the game store owner and his fiance joined us in two new games he got from the maker Stellar Factory.
The first game was SPACETEAM.
The long and short of the game is that you and your friends are on a malfunctioning spaceship and have exactly 5-minutes (real time) to repair the ship before getting sucked into a black hole. To win, each player has a deck of malfunctions they must repair with the tools the whole team is jointly using. So said tools must be passed back and forth between players. Along with malfunctions, though, there are anomalies that (usually) complicate the game, at least for a few seconds.
This is why I now suspect I might be a robot...
One anomaly is the card “Robot” where the flavor text of the card tells you that you are beginning to suspect that you might actually be a robot. And the complication to the game is that whomever gets this anomaly cannot use their thumbs for the rest of the game.
We played 5 games of SPACETEAM. The “Robot” anomaly did not show up in the first game. It DID show up in the remaining 4. I was the one who got it each time. There are even anomalies in the deck that forces players to change seats, giving them a new deck of malfunctions to sort through. Even after shifting to a new seat... there was the “Robot” card. What’s worse (better?) is that out of the four times the “Robot” card showed up, I only had to go thumb-less for 3 games; in the 4th one the “Robot” anomaly was flipped just as time ran out.
The 3 out of 5 times we won the game? The 3 times I actually had to be the robot and work without my thumbs... Hmmm....
Okay, that was weird.
After our 5th game, we decided to switch things up and try another new demo game the owner got: Ravine.
Ravine is also by Stellar Factory, as I mentioned at the top, and it must have come out after SPACETEAM, because there are a couple of references to it within the Madness deck.
See, in Ravine, you and your friends have been stranded in said ravine after a plane crash. You must survive until the Rescued card appears. Each player has six hearts to represent their life total. For various reasons, you will lose hearts while trying to survive. If you ever start a new day with just one heart remaining, the stress makes you snap, and you must take a Madness card and resolve the action.
I had a huge chuckle when, after the third time playing the game, I finally had to pull my first (and only) Madness card, and got this one:
Boy, am I glad we played SPACETEAM first, or this card wouldn’t have been so epic! I was indeed having flashbacks, and was worried I was a robot again! XD
Speaking of! One of the OTHER Madness cards, drawn by the game shop owner, was Close Family (or something to that effect). His madness made him suspect that all the other players were robots, and would only believe that we were human if we could name an immediate family member of his. Hubby knows the owner’s brother, so he told the owner his name. The owner’s fiance mentioned the owner’s mother. There was a random guy who just moved to the area this past week and literally knew no one, so we let him say the fiance. Which meant I was the one left going “do your dogs count? I can tell you your dogs’ names...”
So... I was a robot 4 out of 5 times while playing SPACETEAM, no one else ever got that card, and I was one of 4 players suspected of being a robot while stranded in Ravine...
You think Stellar Factory is trying to tell me something????
