MLEM: Space Agency

In MLEM, players board their feline astronauts aboard a rocket and try and get them onto far-flung moons and planets to score points. The catch is, of course, that – even with opposable thumbs – rocketry is a dangerous science, and missions can often fail…

The board – actually a mat – is placed between players and everyone gets their own mission board with eight astronauts on it. On each turn, one player will be the mission leader and places an astronaut on the cardboard rocket, and then going clockwise around the table, everyone adds an astronaut of their own. Each astronaut has a special ability or power, which we’ll come to later. For now, everyone has an astronaut (or catstronaut, if you must) on board, so let’s take off!

The mission leader rolls a set of dice and chooses which ones to use to move the wooden rocket (representing the mission on the board) that many spaces. The catch is that – apart from the rocket sides of the dice – each die you use this way is used up, and on your next roll you’ll have fewer dice, and fewer chances of moving. But if the rocket has stopped at a disembarkation point – next to a planet or moon – then players can choose to jump off instead: a moon scores instant points, whereas a planet will score at the end of the game for first, second and third place, decided by number of astronauts present, with the tie-breaker being whoever got their earlier in the game. If the mission commander jumps off, the dice are passed to the next player down. If they have jumped off as well, the dice get passed on again. If everyone has left, the mission is over and a new round will begin.

But of course players may choose to stay on the rocket and push their luck. You can never totally run out of dice (if you used up the final one, the next roll lets you take one from the used dice pile) but you can of course roll numbers that don’t move you – in which case the rocket explodes! – and any catstronauts still onboard are returned to their owners. There are instant points available for players to grab by being the first player to achieve certain objectives: three cats on the same planet, four cats on different moons and so on. Apart from that, the game continues either until one player has landed all their cars, or there have been eleven mission failures – and the player with the most points wins.

But wait, because which catstronaut you send on which mission can affect things. Three of them double your points if they land on moons, planets, or deep space (the very top of the board and the furthest you can go). Two are mission-helpful in that they start the rocket in low orbit or add additional ‘1’s to the dice when ‘1’s are chosen. One allows you to eject on explosion and land on an adjacent planet or moon, and one allows you to disembark one space up or down on the track. And one slightly dastardly catstronaut takes a die with it when it leaves the mission, essentially sabotaging the chances of anyone staying onboard!