Culture

If You Enjoy Sci-Fi & Screaming at Friends, Spaceteam Is the Game for You

Spaceteam is a new cooperative shouting card game for 3-6 players

Amazon

You and your friends are on a malfunctioning spacecraft. For the sake of everyone on board, you need to repair the ship as quickly as possible. To make matters worse, you’re also being sucked into a black hole, so every second counts. No, this is not a description of an engineering student’s recurring nightmare, but rather the premise behind Spaceteam, a sci-fi card game that has been described as fast-paced or even frantic by various reviewers.

Spaceteam was adapted from the popular mobile game of the same name, but the cooperative card game version offers its own unique experience, separate from the app (and worth the $24.95 it’s now going for on Amazon. If you’re a believer in the wisdom of crowds, you can look no further than the game’s success on Kickstarter, where it raised nearly $200,000 in its first month.

Spaceteam

The game works like this: Each player begins with a hand of five “Tool Cards.” Each Tool Card is unique, with fun names like “Centrifugal Disperser” or “Kilobypass Transformer.” And each represents a tool that can only fix certain spaceship malfunctions. Those malfunctions are represented by “Malfunction Cards,” and in order to repair a Malfunction, a proper Tool Card must be used. The fun begins when everyone, as a team, has to figure out who has the proper card, and then pass it around the table (never across) to fix the ship before time runs out.

It may sound complicated, but as with all worthwhile games, the fun comes from learning how it works as you play. And according to player testimonials, learning how to play Spaceteam is a fast, easy process. One reviewer on Amazon cited the game’s amazing ice-breaking properties due to its unique, fast-paced, cooperative brand of play:

“Brought this to a game night where I didn’t know many of the people and by the end of the third round we were screaming at each other like we’d known each other for years.”

The basic Spaceteam game has enough cards for 3-6 players, but more players can be added by purchasing additional cards. As for the cards themselves, they’re 100-percent plastic, so they’re sturdy enough to survive the vacuum of outer space, the intense gravitational forces of a black hole, or at the very least, tears and water damage.

Additional cards can be purchased in expansion packs, which are guaranteed to make your Spaceteam sessions way more interesting. There’s the TRIANGULUM EXPANSION, which like Spaceteam itself, is family friendly, and incorporates more areas of the ship into the game. But there’s also the NSFS EXPANSION, which is an adults-only twist on the game, adding elements like “Anesthetizers, Inebriators, and Pleasurizers,” into the mix.

So if you’re ready to see if your personal relationships can survive being marooned on a spaceship, click here to order Spaceteam today.

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