It’s Friday! 🥳 This was a particularly stressful week with not much gaming. ☝️This is why it is of the utmost importance to have games in the collection which you can quickly grab and start playing and Wormholes fits this requirement perfectly! We weren’t really in the mood for playing but a 3 minute setup and a couple of turns later, we quickly got in the groove.

Wormholes has pretty quick turns and a simple ruleset (check this post for more info on rules), but the challenge comes from optimizing your movement with the use of your own and your opponents’ wormholes, to most efficiently carry your passengers to their destination. Even though 2p might not be the ideal player count for this, I do think it plays really well. Pretty soon, very intricate wormhole-systems can be generated, so you have to make clever decisions – though it’s never too complex; remember it has to be playable on a stressful weekday 😅. It feels really good to visit multiple planets in the same turn by jumping in and out of wormholes, instead of slowly traveling 30 spaces.

The card draw randomness can seem bad if you keep drawing different planets that are far away – or if you just draw multiple cards of the planet that you were going to visit anyway. However you do discard and draw a lot of cards during the game, so it should balance itself out. Another clever tool for this is that discarded cards are gathered in a display, and you can draw specific cards from there if you visit the space station.

While the wormholes of course make this game, another awesome feature are the map boards. I love how you can randomly set them up and get a new layout every time. 🥰 The special features always switch things up: asteroids that block movement, nebulae that you can slip through like ice, wild wormholes that connect to your wormholes of the same number, an orbital slingshot that shoots you out in a straight line or a black hole that teleports you to a random planet.

The game ends pretty quickly after each planet is discovered, but it’s also a good thing that it doesn’t overstay its welcome – and you can always just go again, as it’s quick and it’s a blast. 🙃

Review copy provided by AEG