Celestia

Product Information

Each loot card a player receives from an island has a score value, with farther islands having higher value loot. The game ends immediately when a player acquires 50 or more points of loot. The way to achieve this is with each round, all players have one of their five cards upright and visible to the other players at the table. One player will use the letter cards they can see to spell out a word, placing down tokens that specify where in the word each letter comes (1st, 2nd, etc). This word becomes a clue to all the other players about what the letter in front of them might be – if you can see that I have spelled a word that starts 'CR' and then the third and final letter is the card in front of you that you can't see, you could safely assume that it's a 'Y'. However, a third player has the 'C' in front of them, so they're looking at a three-letter word that ends in 'RY', and will be wondering if the first letter is a 'C' or a 'T' or a 'D'. But that's okay – because next round, a new word will be made that might cement which of those options it is.

There's so much game in this box! Honshu is a pretty little game of building a pretty little Japanese town. Each turn takes place in two phases: first, you'll choose a card from your hand, which has six squares on that represent different zones: housing, resources, factories, parks, lakes, and empty brown land. Everyone puts their cards in the middle, and whoever's card has the highest value written at the top gets to choose which cards they want from everyone's options – then the second highest, and so on.

Were I to compare Celestia to one other game, I feel the most apt comparison would be Texas Hold Em’. Despite not being a board game in it’s own right, the collective urge to manipulate and use people into making your joint task more profitable before bullying them out entirely is very much what each and every game of Celestia is all about. With this expansion players might be able to jump into a lifeboat. Now they are masters of their own destiny. This little craft has room for just one. Irrespective of whether the main boat crashes or succeeds, the player claiming the little lifeboat must roll their own dice and play their own cards. Their trouble is now of their own making.

After each round, the gaps in the path left from treasure taken so far are squeezed up, bringing the higher-value tiles within reach, making dangerously deep dives even more tempting. Their shrill screams are nothing compared to the noise I can make with my horn. Dillydilly, dilly-dilly..".If the captain cannot face all the events, he plays no "Equipment" card at all and the aircraft crashes with all its passengers. None of these players receives any "Treasure" card. The current journey ends at this point and a new one begins. Each player chooses an "Adven- turer" tile (he keeps it in front of him) and places the "Adventurer" pawn of the same color in the aircraft. So how does having a little initiative help? What if you don’t trust the captain and prefer to go it alone?