Weird Giraffe Games Stellar Leap

On the left is Stellar Leap, the game I'm reviewing. On the right is my oldest daughter Riley, holding the champion card. She may or may not have beaten her old man like a rented mule while playing the game. I mean rumor says she did, but we all know how rumors are. 

So, something I thoroughly enjoy but don't bring to the page enough is tabletop gaming. I've been known to spend hours with the crew at the gaming shop (Guild of Blades in Clawson, Michigan if you're familiar) performing goofball tasks trying to win cool points by schooling my friends in the exacting art of science of asswhoopery. So, just a couple of weeks ago, I reported to GOB before anyone else, knowing we were going to play a new game and prepared to unleash hell on some people who had to have known what was coming. Tommy, after all, is always complaining that I always win. The reason why is simple: I figure out what I need to do to win the game and then I do it.

And Stellar Leap is a game with a fairly shallow learning curve. You need victory points to win. There are various ways to get them. There are "Events" in the game that are triggered by an individual but effect everyone playing. After a certain amount of Events, I want to say it's six, you total up the victory points and whoever has the most wins.

Of course, if you bring your daughter and she's as intelligent and ruthless as her father, she can ruin all your plans of winning. I've been crying daily because of the totally unearned beating I received at her hands. I'm pretty sure she's going to tattoo "I beat my dad" on her forehead as well. Live is so unfair.

It's totally not my fault though. Gameplay flows so easily and is quickly paced enough that her young age was obviously an unfair advantage. Before the rest of us could even figure out what was going on and how to score points, Riley was off and running, completing missions and racking up points. When we were picking up specialized cards to tailor out gameplay with scoring systems particular to each individual player, she somehow managed to ferret out the best one without having played the game before. Hmm...

I guess I'll be watching her.

The game focuses on resource gathering and exploration/discovering new planets and asteroids. There are victory points awarded based on the number of discoveries made by each player. I focused my strategy on discovery and the points I could gather that way. There are also victory points awarded for things like how many resources that you have at the end of the game (and how many resources per victory point depends on the card you draw individually and can vary from player to player.) There are only four resources, but they're used for everything from traveling, to mining, to gathering, to well...

Basically anything you do in the game. 

Some of resource gathering is intentional. Resources can be mined from asteroids and gathered from planets. There is a phase of your turn where you can do so and you are limited to so much mining and gathering per turn. Some of it is random. At the beginning of every players turn they roll two dice (that's 2D6 for you roleplayers out there) and, depending on where the planets are (You can't live on an asteroid. You can only mine it and return.) what kind of resources are available on a given planet and what's rolled, resources are distributed immediately. This makes things interesting, because an apparently defeated opponent can go from nearly out of resources to having a surfeit of them, all without doing a thing themselves to cause it.

Oh, and the one universal part of the experience is that everyone starts off resource poor, but we all had oodles and bunches of resources at the end. Stellar Leap feels like a Ferengi game at times, because it is all about Acquisition. Acquiring planets, acquiring resources, acquiring victory points, but sadly not acquiring properly trained kids who let their father win. I'll have to work on that one.

Population is a big thing, not just because you get victory points based on how many meeple you have at the end of the game, but because exploiting the planets and asteroids that get discovered is an exercise dependent upon having a population there to do so.

Probably one of my favorite parts of the game was the ease of setup. Setting up Stellar Leap is not the time soaking, day wasting exercise that a game like Axis and Allies is. It took us about five to ten minutes the day we played it and none of us knew what we were doing. If I had it to do again actually knowing what went where and how things were supposed to look I could probably cut that time in half now. Clean up took a bit longer but was still a lot easier than most of the games I've played. Seriously, I've seen Monopoly take longer to clean up than Stellar Leap did. And believe me, both me and the stinkin' meanie I brought with me were hungry after gaming and in a hurry to go get some grub. I'd have noticed if it had taken a long time. 

Seriously, I'd recommend Stellar Leap to anyone who likes tabletop gaming and doesn't necessarily feel the need to overcomplicate things. Don't get me wrong. I've played some extremely rule-intensive games with millions of pieces (and if you haven't played Nemesis you're doing it wrong. Just the minis that came with that game nearly made me lose my mind in an excess of pure joy) but it's nice to have a somewhat more relaxed experience where I can just play the game without all the drama. 

Oh, and the factions are easy to understand. They're not overcomplicated and, really, the difference between factions come more from the cards you draw at the beginning (and I still can't remember what they're called) than choice. This is really the one time you can pick your team based on your favorite color and not look like a goofball.  That part is cool, too.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Space Dinosaurs

Stellar Leap
Weird Giraffe Games, 2019

Stellar Leap is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage of your purchase at no additional cost to you.