Space Cadets is a belter of a concept. Who doesn’t want to zoom round the galaxy in a spaceship with your friends, tractor beaming space crystals and firing torpedos at all and sundry?
The game shoves you and up to five friends onto a cartoon spaceship, with each person taking on exactly the sort of jobs you’d expect to find on board. Working as a well-oiled team, each running their station to perfection, you’ll see your vessel gracefully dance around the cosmos meeting new lifeforms and blowing them to smithereens.
Except you won’t. Because you’re all incompetent. At the game! I mean at the game.
Each station – Captain, Helm, Engineering, Weapons, Shields, Sensors, Tractor Beam, Damage & Repair and Jump Drive – requires whoever is in the chair to play a mini-game while a supposedly 30-second timer wooshes away at impossible speed. Sensors, for example, needs to pull the right tiny cardboard shape out of a bag of near-identical tiny cardboard shapes to lock onto an enemy ship, while shields sees you rearranging a small set of numbered tiles into poker-style hands to boost defences around different sides of the ship. Just look at them all!
As well as being almost impossible not to hideously screw up, these games are all played in tandem with several others, leading to the hilarious point each turn where everyone looks up meekly from their mess of a station to see the same look of agony on their team-mates’ faces staring back at them.
The beauty of this is that small mistakes on each station compound errors on the others. The helmsman accidentally sends the ship spinning forwards and to the right and straight through a nebula, meaning the sensor officer loses the lock on an enemy ship he spent the last turn sweating to acquire. Weapons only managed to load a single torpedo anyway, and now fails pitifully trying to blow up the evading enemy by flicking the torpedo counter all of two centimetres down the track.
At least shields got the port side well defended! Except the enemy is now up the ship’s arse thanks to helm’s inability to fly in a straight line. Boom! The enemy’s attack causes a core breach, which is exactly as bad as it sounds and will need to be dealt with by some of the other stations in the next 30-second round. While they still try to do the jobs they were already royally ballsing up. You might as well drive into an asteroid at this point and be done with it.
It sounds hilarious right? Well it is – each of these mini games are light and breezy enough that you’ll more or less have the hang of them in a few turns, while also being obtuse enough that you’ll rarely completely nail them – and even if you do, someone else on the ship will have blown theirs. But let’s go back to the top.
Space Cadets is a belter of a concept.Who doesn’t want to zoom round the galaxy in a spaceship with your friends, tractor beaming space crystals and firing torpedos at all and sundry?
Correct. And the thing is, all of this is side-achingly, brilliant fun. For about an hour or so. And therein lies Space Cadets’ big problem.
This game should be an absolute gimme for new players, and to people new to board games in general. Everyone gets the theme, you get one job to do, everyone expects to do it badly and you all have to come together as a team to salvage something from your wreck of a mission.
In practice, it’s a slog. Working the helm makes navigating the 30-page rulebook look easy, and for a game centred on breezy mini-games the core rules are far too extensive to keep things light. None of it is too complicated in and of itself, but keeping myriad rules in your head for what happens when you fly into an asteroid field, how damage control works, can an enemy lock on and damage you – it all adds up to far too much leafing through pages of small text when you should be gearing up for the next action round.
It’s such a pity, as I feel that so much of the excitement me and my friends had for this game has been chipped away after a few plays. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to inject more spark into it, but I think really it just needs a group of players who have all gone through the mill a handful of times and a captain who knows the rulebook inside out. Sadly, getting to that stage seems to be the ultimate challenge that Space Cadets provides.