In those growing up moments when I was not haring around a playground with a coat buttoned only around my neck pretending to be Batman I wanted to be an astronaut. Whisper it, but nearly half a century later I still would love love love to go into space. Not necessarily to the moon or anything, but just high enough to be able to see the curvature of the earth, to look outwards and see the blackness of it all. That would be utterly thrilling. I imagine that I would try to savour every second, as I have done with some other experiences in my life, enjoy those weightless moments freed from earthly bonds, and then, all too soon, I would be back on solid ground, having briefly touched the voidest of voids.
But it would not be like that at all, not if board games are anything to go by. The rocket would, on a good day, maybe take off, then a booster would fail, perhaps a bit of raffia work would come off the outside taking some pipes with it, the oxygen tanks would start to wobble and a couple of fuses would blow. Put a gamer in a spaceship and things start to go wrong – Assembly does it, Sensor Ghosts does it, even newbie Solar Storm does it, let’s do it, let’s fall in love…sorry, let’s hear it for malfunctioning craft and, specifically, Tony Boydell’s Lux Aeterna.
In common with its error-spewing fellows, Lux Aeterna sees its crew (of one in this game) fight against time to fix the failed systems of their craft before it is sucked into a nearby black hole and, well, who knows? Do tell us, because we are desperate to find out. And you will find sometimes yourself falling into that black hole or running out of time instead, but jiggle at least some of those recalcitrant systems into action with enough seconds to spare and you might just be able to jump start the Lux and get out of there.
As you may have gathered from the previous paragraph, victory in Lux Aeterna means dodging both the black hole and a time limit, but there is also the need to keep at least three systems from total decay, so there are very definite ways in which you can lose the game, but if you survive you will get a score, and that can be used to quantify the scale of your victory, although against the tighter time limits it is tricky enough to make approximately correct decisions, let alone maximise your tally of points.
First things first, though. Lux Aeterna comes in a small and very portable box, but inside it contains a selection of lovely and rather large cards, and the artwork on them is outstanding; individual, strong and really rather beautiful. Alex Lee needs to be mentioned for producing these striking images, and it seems a shame that one cannot enjoy them mid-game (time limit!) but they are worth spending a few moments with when you first encounter the components. A really fine touch is that the astronaut’s face is never shown in the images, so squint a little and perhaps this could actually be you, or maybe one of your very great-grandchildren, and it is all slightly hallucinogenic, stretched, maybe subject to a place where the laws of physics are beginning to break down. Lovely stuff.
Set up is easy enough for this game, selecting a random card for each of your ship’s systems, removing a few cards from the main deck and shuffling some glitches into its latter part. You place your spaceship however far you like from the black hole, further away clearly being safer while nearer brings more points in the event that you survive, and your console card goes right in front of you. Each system gets its own colour-coded die showing a value of two, you set the timer, press Start and away you go.
On each turn of Lux the player draws four cards from the deck and assigns them to different areas around the console, as each card shows multiple values for the different functions. One card will cause a particular system to decay (or not, if you are lucky), another will trigger an action, a third will set the ship’s speed towards the black hole, while a fourth gets stored in the cache for the next turn. In this way, after the first turn there are nearly always five cards to choose from, three of which will be used, one stored and one discarded.
Play Lux without the timer and you have plenty of time to work out what should go where, and one of the main aims of the game, apart from not dying, of course, is to get systems back online, which involves increasing their dice values to anything above six. Actions may allow for rerolls, swaps, additions and subtractions, and these are all fine and dandy were it not for the pressing need to use those actions for other purposes as well. Did I mention needing to stay away from the black hole?
If a system decays below a value of zero then its negative ability comes into play for the rest of the game, but if you get it back online then something positive tends to happen, although repairing some systems can result in no in-game advantage at all, just a boost to your score at the end of play. Prioritise which system absolutely needs to go online and which ones can be left to fizzle out in a shower of zero-G sparks and you will be able to save precious seconds on that timer.
Once you get a quarter of the way into the deck the glitches begin to appear, and these bold, red cards take effect as soon as they are drawn. Some will interfere with your systems, while one particularly nasty one draws the Lux four spaces closer to the black hole, potentially a game-ending event. Only a certain number of these cards find their way into each game, but in some quantum reality you just know that the card that will kill you off is exactly the one to have found its way into the bottom of the deck. Some actions and systems allow for the removal of glitches, which is very handy indeed, but doing this as an action means that something else needs to be put off until later.
Lux is therefore a game a balance, of galactic whack-a-mole up against a time limit that will often force you into uncomfortable and risky decisions, decisions which – whisper it – will put you at the mercy of the gaming gods, along the lines of I should be fine just as long as I don’t draw…aarggh! Like floating away from some long-lost love in aching spacial slowmo, though, what was once at fingertip distance in this game has a discombobulating tendency to end up as a shattered hope as instead you indulge in the future equivalent of Bank Holiday DIY with no tools or instuctions and a whole lot of swearing.
Fall into the black hole or fail to get to the end of the deck within the time limit or let too many systems go awry and it is game over, but survive long enough to power up the thrusters with just the right amount of juice to get away from the event horizon and you can tot up your scores in leisurely fashion while you snuggle down into hypersleep. Seven points for each operative system (more if you are lucky) plus one for each non-destroyed system, plus the points for your starting space, and that is pretty much it. Oh, and one particularly nasty glitch might also slap you with a ten-point penalty, just to keep you on your spaceboot-coddled toes.
The variability of Lux Aeterna’s set up means that the game is distinctly customisable, and the rules booklet outlines various ways in which this can be achieved. Begin without the timer to get used to the mechanisms, perhaps, and then start the clock at ten minutes, and then start a little closer to the black hole. At a certain point you will find the version that does it for you, whether you are an I-need-to-win type or a Give-me-your-worst gamer. My personal sweet spot is with an eight minute timer and the six system cards placed face down at the start of the game. Yes, face down.
While this approach means that certain actions lose their value – I am thinking of the ‘swap any two dice’ action specifically – this clears a little space in terms of making decisions, and I do like the way that this set up means that a system can be brought back online at great emotional cost to achieve a difference of absolutely nothing. Stupid ship. With barely four hundred and twenty seconds to play with, triumphantly flipping over a system card to find out that there is no bonus there feels like a real slap in the face, which, in the context of a pressured real-time game, is a very good thing indeed even if it makes me feel like Basil Fawlty in the rain with a large branch.
Of course, much of what can happen in Lux is determined by the gods of luck, but at least the time limit means that irritating defeats can be swiftly swept aside as you set up for another irritating defeat, and this is a crucial part of games with large swings of luck – they have to be short. Thankfully, though, each game of Lux feels winnable, even those defeats suffered when you are glitched into a black hole, in which case you can wonder if you should have been just a little more cautious earlier on.
Scores can also vary wildly, so while Lux is ostensibly a beat-your-own-score creation, I still view it more as a win-or-lose scenario, all that pointage merely icing on the cake. Get the balance and the set up right and this should feel like a game that needs to be survived. After all, if that timer is going to force you to make panicked decisions then you should certainly feel as if your life depends on it.
If I need to sound a note of caution about Lux, to insert that your mileage may vary thing, then I need to mention two things will hopefully serve to put this review into some sort of context. Firstly, as a glance through my recorded plays on BGG will attest, I have a soft spot for quick-playing solo games, not necessarily because I think that they might be better than an epic session of Mage Knight, but because they fit my lifestyle nicely, in which I often find myself travelling around and with ten minutes to spare. All things being equal, I would rather play something than refresh Twitter for the umpteenth time to see if I have been liked, so games such as Lux (and Aquaducts and Orchard and Sprawlopolis) tend to do very well. For context, Friday, The Lost Expedition and Superhot did not. If you are not into quick solo games then Lux might not hit your sweet spot quite as convincingly. The second thing I need to mention is that I received my copy from the designer, although it was not with the condition of making a review. There, caveat emptor.
So Lux Aeterna is a definite thumbs up from me, colourful, beautifully illustrated and fun to play, stressful too. I miss that in the heat of play I cannot immerse myself in the theme and the art, and the scores are there more as a kind of pat on the back than to grant legitimate bragging rights, but them’s the gaming breaks. However, find how you want this game to be for you and it will fill that coffee break gap that you would otherwise have spent looking out of the window, although, on second thoughts, herbal tea might be better, keep the nerves steady. I am currently at more than ten plays with Lux and do not see myself stopping for a while, especially with rumours of some new cards in the offing, and at a beguilingly low price you should certainly consider this for your solo shelf if it, ahem, Lux at all intriguing.
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