Frozen

In Cryo ❄️ your colony ship has crashed on an uncharted icy planet, and you are fighting for survival. The game lasts until the sun goes down – after sunset the surface of the planet goes so cold that nobody can survive. So you try to recover and move as many life pods down into the caverns as possible to come out on top at the end.

Cryo is a worker placement game. It’s pretty free-flow as there are no rounds. On your turn you can either send one of your 3 drones to a spot or call back all of your drones. Calling them back also activates certain bonuses on your player board, depending on where they dock.

Resources are pretty scarce. You will mostly try to free your life pods from different areas of wreckage and gather energy to send out vehicles to transfer the pods into the caverns.

There is a neat system where you can put resource tiles onto your player board to make different conversion and resource engines. Another thing is area majority scoring inside the caverns at end. You can also sabotage 💥 your fellow players, destroying their unclaimed life pods – however it is not too bad, because everyone sees where a sabotage is possible and can prepare for it.

One of my beloved game mechanics also turn up here: multi-use cards. 👍 The cards in the game can be played in 4 ways: scrapped for resources, played as permanent passive upgrades, used as vehicles to send out life pods or to use as end-game objectives. However unfortunately there are only 8 different card types, so you end up seeing the same things.

To be honest we were a bit underwhelmed by the game. 🙁 I don’t see too much replayability – though I also think with more than 2 players the whole dynamic of the game would be much more interesting. I kept feeling as if we were playing an introductory mode, after which you can add the „expert modules” – however there are sadly none.
We are totally in love with the art direction and the component quality though. 🤩