Post from 8/10/2022

🌑 Skymines sadly wasn't for sale yet during Gen Con, but we found it in the Hot Games Room 🙃 - a ticketed event with a library of new releases to pick from. Skymines is a new edition and re-theme of Mombasa.

We do have some excellent @alexxpfister games, but we actually never played Mombasa, so we were excited for the opportunity to try Skymines. 😁 We especially like the sci-fi 🚀 theme that the game got. Unfortunately I won't be able to compare the two games though.

Your goal is to have the most points by the end of the game. Points come from 3 main sources:
⚗️ - your research track
☁️ - your helium-3 track
📈 - your stocks in the 4 companies: the more outposts a company has on the board, the more valuable each share is. You get shares from certain cards and by going up the company tracks.

👆Each round players simultaneously plan their turns by playing cards into their action slots on the bottom of their player board. At first you have 3 slots but you can unlock 2 more by reaching certain milestones. At end of the round cards are discarded to the top of the board also in multiple slots, and you can only get cards back from one slot in a round - this makes an interesting dynamic as you plan for future turns. 🧐

There are a few kinds of cards:
- 💎 3 different minerals: these let you buy new cards from the display or move up the tracks of companies. Each company gives passive bonuses from a certain threshold.
- ⚡ Energy: this lets you build outposts for the companies, earning bonuses depending on where you built.
- ⚗️ Research Scientist: this gets you new research tiles and moves up your research marker. This has a very interesting mechanic that requires clever planning in advance.
- ☁️ Field Scientist: these are quite simple - just move up your helium-3 marker

You also have bonus discs that you use like worker placement each round for a wide array of effects.

We enjoyed the game a lot with two. There is also an automa which we didn't bother to learn, as the rules learning was long as it was already 😅 - but we really want to try it in the future. There is some kind of campaign mode too, and a completely different second side of the board.