chill and relaxing strategy.

Interesting game of weaving together a hyperspace graph (with no edge crossings) between planets in order to connect supply directly to demand, with exploration to add uncertainty.

Fun, in a puzzly sort of way, but it was recommended to me as a game where a playthrough takes about an hour, and I found it was more like 2-3 hours, or even a touch longer if I spent the time to really puzzle through a particularly thorny conundrum I'd put myself into. (It's certainly *possible* to play a game in an hour, I did it once, but it required blitz-flailing through by punting to semi-random guessing on most of the interesting problems/decisions, which lost much of what I liked about the gameplay. Maybe once you know the game well you can slam out a quick 60-minute play and have it be satisfying?)

A thought on the game's theme/philosophical stance: on the face of it, the game presents as 100% (and unapologetically) colonial. You've got this playground of empty planets to colonize, extract resources from, develop, terraform, move, or even destroy;* a bigger empire gives you more points; etc. But then there are these interesting little divots in that worldview: you have a council of 3 alien advisors who seem like they're powerful, well-established civilizations helping out your tiny corner of the galaxy in a fairly hands-off way.** And at the end of the game, for scoring, money has no value - it isn't even shown - but happiness is genuinely significant, a multiplier on your final score. Commerce is framed as a means to a particular end.



* Some of these actions require techs.

** Though thinking deeper, after their initial Perks, the alien civs only help you to the extent that you've done things for them / that your development has aligned with their philosophies... even if you, say, have planetfuls of people in really dire trouble due to lack of food. And while tasks for them have no deadline, if you finish the game with any left hanging it penalizes your score. So it swings back around to feeing colonial again - albeit in a different way than the game's basic framing.