Game Spotlight – Junk Orbit

Junk orbit from Renegade Game Studios is a game about picking bits and things up in orbit around the Earth, Mars, or the Moon (and  Phobos and Deimos with a 4 and 5 player game) and chucking them out of your spaceship to propel yourself to more junk. If you manage to get junk to its designated city, congratulations!  You score!  Otherwise, the junk just floats around until someone else comes along to pick it up-maybe they can do a better job of delivering it to where it needs to go.

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In a three player game, you set up Earth, the Moon and Mars and randomly populate the cities with the appropriate junk tiles (each junk tile is color coded on the back – blue for Earth, gray for the Moon and red for Mars). In a 4 player game you add the square Martian moon Phobos and in a 5 player game you add the smaller triangle Martian moon Deimos.  Both Martian moons are Martian so they will get populated with red backed junk tiles.  

Everyone places their ship on the starting city of Keppler on the Moon with a couple generic junk tiles (for the purposes of getting your ship moving; beginning junk does not score) and randomly one each of a Mars, Moon and Earth tile. From this point on, players throw junk out the back of the ship to propel it forward – the junk goes X number of cities one way (X being the number in the upper left of the junk tile) while the ship goes the opposite way the same number of cities.  If you hit a junction between planets, you can’t reverse back on yourself but must “slingshot” your way around the planet until you get to where you want to go (there is a special ability of one of the ships to make sharp turns but unless you are blue you have to obey the laws of space junk propulsion).

If you happen to throw your junk to land at the same city that is on the junk tile, you get to keep that junk in your delivery (score) pile (Remote Delivery propulsion HUZZAH!). If you land at the same city as a piece of junk in your cargo area, you have made a Direct Delivery, HUZZAH! Add that junk tile to your Deliveries area. Whenever you land at a city, you pick up all the junk at that city and then repopulate the bare city with another tile from the stack. Keep going until one of the planet’s tiles is exhausted. This triggers endgame and everyone gets one more turn before scores are tallied.

But what if you throw junk out the back of your ship and it lands at the same city as another player? Congratulations, you have beaned that other player in the ship with your junk. They must now discard a tile from their cargo or delivery area to whatever city they happen to be floating at. Unless you are playing B-Side Yellow, in which case you ignore junk of value 1 or 2. Hazards of the world of junk trading.

Things I liked: 

• Heh…throwin’ junk out your cargo doors to tool about the system. I kinda love the move dynamics of this game. HEAVE HO! Bonus extra points for beaning other players with your junk.
• I like that this game isn’t a particularly hard game to play and yet the different ship abilities add a nice little something extra to keep it from being grab the junk, toss the junk.
• The determination of the start player:

Things I didn’t like: 

• That round container. It’s cool in design and it’s different but it wreaks havoc on my game storage system. 
• Have I mentioned the round box? Not only does it bother me externally when I’m trying to make it fit with all my square games, but its own polygonal components don’t fit best in the round inside.  The directions are an accordinated fold out deelie (rather than a stapled booklet) so no matter what end you grab them by there is a danger of ripping the pages trying to get it out of the box without upending everything. 
• I feel that this game could have maybe a few more junk tiles; every time I play it I just get into my groove and then whoops! Endgame.