Base price: $30.
2 – 8 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 30
Full disclosure: A review copy of Look at the Stars was provided by Pandasaurus Games.
I’ve actually been looking forward to this game for a while! It managed to beat the entire lifecycle of “learn about it at Gen Con”, “try it on BGA”, “play it a few dozen times” before it arrived stateside. But it’s here now and I’m excited to tell y’all about it. It certainly seems like the flip-and-write / roll-and-write craze has died down a bit, but there’s always room for more good games. Let’s jump into Look at the Stars!
In Look at the Stars, players look up from various parts of the world to see the night sky (at different times, of course; that’s how the night works). As they do, a whole host of stars appear! Now, everyone can trace constellations and patterns to see what they can make against the backdrop of the sky. How many constellations can you find before dawn?
Contents
Setup
Not much here. Each player’s going to get a board and a marker:
Shuffle up the Night Cards and make three face-down stacks of six cards each. Those’ll be the decks. Shuffle the two different decks of star bonus cards separately and reveal one of each. More on those later.
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Look at the Stars is a flip-and-write game of constellation creation! Over three rounds, you’ll draw cards and connect stars to create constellations, but be careful! As the sun rises each round, you won’t be able to see (or connect!) those stars anymore!
Each turn, a card is revealed and all players must add both lines onto their boards in the configuration on the card. The card can be rotated (and a player rotating the card doesn’t rotate the card for other players). Lines on the card can’t be drawn over existing lines, but lines can share endpoints with other lines or intersect other lines, so that’s fun. Lines also cannot touch Shooting Stars or planets or other things that the Bonus Cards might create, as well.
Creating shapes pictured on Bonus Cards may offer you extra points or abilities! Note that those shapes can be part of larger constellations; they don’t have to be entirely distinct. You just can’t use the same pieces of a shape to activate a Bonus Card multiple times.
After a stack of cards is used up, the sun rises a bit! This means that no lines can be drawn under the first (and then second) lines on the board (denoted by the triangles on each side. After the third stack of cards is depleted, the game ends!
Players score their constellations by size. Each size of constellation scores only once, so if you have a size-3 constellation, you earn 3 points. If you have two, you still only earn 3 points. Shooting Stars score based on how long they are, and Bonuses score their indicated amount. Planets score 1 point for each unique constellation in the eight spaces surrounding them. Add up the points and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Generally, there aren’t a ton of differences here, as is usually the case with the X-and-write genre. Everyone’s playing fairly independently on their own boards, so you won’t see a ton of player interaction. That’s kind of the de facto standard, so no complaints, here. Plus, I wouldn’t want other players messing up my constellations anyways. That said, my usual gripe applies here, as well: even though play is simultaneous and should theoretically scale with player count, I find that the larger the game, the more generally unwieldy it becomes. There’s usually more questions and more confusion, whereas a lower player count keeps the game running quickly and tight. It’s not a strong preference, but I tend to lean towards the lower end of the player count spectrum for a lot of these games, Look at the Stars included. That said, with eight experienced players, I doubt there’s much of an issue (beyond players wanting to rotate the cards).
Strategy
- You really want to plan ahead. You need to have a strategy in place for what you’re building towards. Give yourself space for constellations, try not to crowd yourself, and make sure that you’re not leaving too many things to chance. If you’re worried about the time limit, try making part of your lower constellations extend above the line, so that you can continue to add on to them in subsequent rounds!
- Don’t double up! Don’t make two constellations of the same size! You won’t really get any points for that (unless they’re both near planets, and even then, it’s only one extra point).
- Also, avoid accidentally connecting constellations; anything over size 8 won’t score. This is a common mistake in players’ first games; they accidentally fuse two large constellations together into a supermassive constellation that’s unfortunately entirely worthless. Keep your constellations eight or smaller!
- The Bonuses are pretty useful, if you can get them to work for you. I find that some of the more elaborate ones aren’t worth chasing (they’re just hard to assemble). Instead, I usually go after the bonuses that give me more abilities or space or other new features; you can mix up the game a lot that way.
- Leave some space for the Shooting Stars! There’s usually at least one Shooting Star per game, and that’s going to be a big diagonal that extends up to three lines. The longer you can make it, the more points you get, and that can be a game-swinging play, at times. You should try to leave some space on your board for them since they can’t connect with any other constellations.
- There’s some temptation to build out sprawling constellations, but if you do that you’ll probably end up with collisions late in the game. I end up trying to make tight constellations that use up as little space as possible, if I can, so that I have a lot more room to work with and I don’t risk any overlap. Granted, easier said than done.
- Similarly, with planets, you want to try and build a bunch of constellations that start near them and move away from them to maximize their scores. This one’s a bit tricky. Planets score 1 point for every constellation on the spaces surrounding them. This means, ideally, you could technically score 8 points per planet if you had eight unique constellations, one on each space. That’s … not going to happen, but you can scale that ambition down a bit and make each planet worth 3 – 5 points if you plan ahead.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- A very lovely theme for a game. I like stellar-themed games, personally. Is space terrifying? Absolutely (though the deep ocean is scarier). Are stars just giant fusion explosions burning in space? Yes. Are they nice to look at? Also yes. Sometimes things can be multiple things.
- I particularly like the subtle changes in art style on the boards depending on where the people on the boards are located. It’s things like the borders being different for different cultures, which I appreciate. It’s a nice bit of attention to detail.
- More generally, the art style is very pleasant. It’s got a very drawn quality to it, and the exclusive use of black, white, and gold makes for a very striking presentation on the box and game. I really like it!
- The cards come in their own little box! That’s nice; prevents them flying everywhere when the box is moved.
- It’s a nice spatial game. I really enjoy the more spatially-oriented X-and-write games. Makes me miss games like Tag City, which I haven’t played in a while.
- Plays pretty quickly! There are really only 18 turns in the entire game (which, granted, isn’t always an indicator of how quick the game is), but the turns are also pretty short and punchy (you’re drawing two tiny line segments each turn, essentially).
Mehs
- I almost wish there were some kind of physical way to draw the sun up each round; I sometimes forget and that can mess with your strategy. Each round, the sun rises a bit and you cannot draw below a certain point. I like that a lot, but it does require you to keep track of it using the little arrows on the side of the board. Sometimes you miss them! Sometimes you plan around something after you’ve missed them! It’s a whole thing.
- The markers are pretty good, but they’re sometimes a bit hard to see. I’m a little skeptical of white markers (they don’t erase particularly well) but I will say these are better than most of the ones I’ve used in the past. Some don’t always leave a mark on the board in a way that’s particularly visible, which isn’t great.
- The spatial elements can lead to some slowdown and confusion (players often need to rotate the cards or look closely at them). Sometimes it’s genuinely challenging to figure out if a certain line segment can be legally placed on your board because you have to translate the image on the card to your board. Some players are good at that kind of thing; many players are not.
Cons
- There are enough cards left out of the game that whether you can get a score bonus or not can be kind of swingy. You might just never see certain types of line segments or shapes. Granted, they can rotate, so you shouldn’t be entirely out of luck, but things can get a little messy during the game if you end up relying on certain cards. There are a lot of cards left out!
- Similarly, since each size can only score once, scores can be pretty tight during the game (making any minor shift in scoring sometimes enough to actually swing the outcome). This is more of a gripe that I have: since players can only score each constellation size once, this means that if you have players who have done all of those things equally well, a lot of what the game comes down to is whether or not one player was better about placing Shooting Stars or constellations near planets, which, yes, you can influence by planning ahead, but there’s a nontrivial luck component to that that some players might find frustrating. Thankfully, for me, the game is short enough that it’s never a huge problem.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I’ve been enjoying Look at the Stars! I mean, any game that I’ve played at least thirty times is usually going to be decently high on my list, otherwise I’d kind of imagine I get sick of it after the third or fourth play. I’d say that it largely is the theme that draws me in, though I’m a sucker for spatial gameplay pretty much every time. I like building the constellations gradually and out of order to try and meet a few very specific targets, even if I find it frustrating that I can only score one constellation of each size. For my friends and I that have played this a number of times, that means it usually comes down to who gets the bonuses and who uses the Shooting Stars and the planets better to their advantage, which is at least pretty fun. From a photography standpoint, I don’t love the black-and-white aesthetic of the game, but I do have to give it to them: it looks pretty nice on the table, even with the white markers. Beyond that, there’s a lot to be said for Bombyx in the past year: Sea Salt & Paper is excellent, Look at the Stars is pretty great, too! Two solid published titles, so I’m excited to see what’s coming down the pipeline from them next. I think it’s Knarr? We’ll see. Either way, if you enjoy constellations, flip-and-write games, or spatial challenges, you’ll probably like Look at the Stars! I’ve certainly enjoyed it.
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