Ceres Demo

Let's do some asteroid mining today, shall we? 🙃 We played a Ceres demo at Spiel 22 and got through about 2/3rd of a game, before our 3rd player had to leave.

👌 It is a worker placement game with the usual stuff: resource management and a fair amount of engine building, however there are 2 interesting mechanisms about Ceres I’d like to highlight:

👉 You can assign an available colored worker from the common pool to a matching colored facility in your tableau, or, if a specific worker type is gone, you can hire new ones from the ship that comes every round. These workers thematically work for you in this round, and go back to the common pool at the end of the round. This means, each round the pool of available workers grows, and every player can assign them, so plan accordingly! If You assign one worker, you get to activate that facility's actions.

👉 The rotating asteroid belts make this game pop visually. I find the implementation very thematic: the farther the asteroid is, the more launching a probe to it will cost. Asteroids near the sun rotate faster than those in the outer rim. Launching probes to them provide you with resources, victory points and income.

You also have a lot of resource management in the game, as there are 4 different kinds of resources, plus influence and credits (some you track on a resource board, some with tokens).

Besides gathering resources you can do many more things on the board (using your cylindrical player tokens) or in your facilities: manufacture and launch probes, turn ore into alloy that is used for buying new facilities, upgrade facilities, trade with the incoming ship, claim objective cards to gain more points or use your influence for bonuses or activating blocked actions.

💬 The demo was fun to play.😊 There is a lot to think about and plan for; watch out so you can activate your tableau before workers are used up, and don't get blocked out of the actions you want to do. There is a fair amount of engine building with your facility cards, upgrades and probes. You will be able to do more as the game goes on. This one is also coming to KS soon.