The inhabitants of the Andromeda galaxy want expansion capital, but they're reluctant to let those annoying human backers get too close to their planets! It's a loopy premise, but it makes for an entertaining hybrid of card and board games.
Andromeda is one of a small army of German games that have been trickling into America recently.
European games don't suffer the "kids-only" stigma placed on most American games, and are designed to entertain entire families. The rules are simple, so that younger players can master them, but they also present the adults in the family with enough strategic options to make play challenging.
The most popular of this wave of games has been Klaus Teuber's Settlers of Catan, but U.S.-born designer Alan Moon has also acquired a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic.
The colorful board, which shows the planets and the three available bases around each planet, is used primarily to keep score. Two status boxes -- "spaceship development" and "technology development" -- represent how many cards each player may hold and which special actions he or she may take, respectively.
Wheeling and dealing
Cards are very important. Players collect sets of three or more cards through an innovative method of silent trading. These sets can then be used to fund trading expeditions, buy better spacecraft or improve their technology.
At the start of each trading round, one player (designated as the "starting player") lays down the cards he or she would like to trade, and the other players must respond by offering cards of their own.
When the starting player receives a satisfactory offer, the cards change hands. The other player then has the option to keep the cards or trade them with somebody else. Trading continues until everybody has had an opportunity to exchange cards.
It's a simple game mechanic -- difficult to describe, but easy to demonstrate -- but it allows for an impressive amount of strategy and silent communication, even among young players.
The cards create a silent dialogue of offers and counteroffers. By looking at the cards offered, each player can determine what the others don't want. By examining the board and seeing where the players are concentrating their efforts, they can to figure out what the others do want.
First commercial contact
Like many games of the European style, Andromeda is somewhat abstract. However, the trading mechanics are reminiscent of solutions that several science fiction writers have devised for humans to carry on commerce with aliens who do not share a common language with us.
Heinlein, for example, suggested a basic, language-independent system in Citizen of the Galaxy in which Free Traders and aliens would shift goods from pile to pile. Items would be added or removed for days until one side was satisfied, at which point they would simply take their pile of goods back home.
Of course, winning a game of Andromeda takes more than shrewd trading. It takes luck as well.
When players turn in sets of cards in exchange for the right to set up trading bases, they do not win the bases outright. Instead, cards function as raffle tickets, giving the player who makes a set a chance to win a base.
After a player redeems a set of cards, he or she places a small cup over the expeditions on a planet and swirls it around. If one of his or her expeditions is the first to emerge from the cup, he or she wins the base. Otherwise, the expedition that emerges is returned to Earth, which improves the set-making player's chances of succeeding next time.
Players can maximize their chances by concentrating expeditions on a few planets, but that reduces their flexibility in card play. The use of the cup accurately represents the changing odds without resorting to tables, math, and die rolls.
The result is a nice mix of luck, strategy and -- as usual with European strategy games -- an elegant design.
Andromeda sells for $39.95, and can be found at
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