Zenith

Zenith is a two (or four players, with 2 teams) player game of trying to wrestle control of planets. We’ll describe the team version of the game here – we think it’s the best way to experience it, although 1v1 is also a lot of fun. It is ostensibly a lane-battler game: players face off along five ‘lanes’ – the planets – and play cards to each lane to drag the planet your way. If you pull it so far that it comes off the board, you claim it, and take a step towards victory. But there’s a little more nuance to Zenith than that, as we shall see.

Players sit either side of the board. It has the five contested planets at the centre, and either side there is a Diplomacy board and a Technology board – we’ll come to those shortly. Everyone has a hand of cards from a large deck, and on your team’s turn you can discuss with your team-mate who should go first: communication is limited in that you cannot show each other your cards. But you can describe what cards you have – as precisely as you like – with the drawback that the other team will hear this information too. Then each player takes a turn playing a card.

The nub of the game, as mentioned above, is to play a card to its matching planet, paying the cost in credits (teams begin with 8 credits each). It will always move that planet a step towards you, and usually have some other beneficial effect, like gaining you more credits, more planet movement, or perhaps some of the precious zenithium needed for the technology track.

There are two other ways to play a card: one, paying the aforementioned zenithium, allows you to move up one of the three technology tracks. These will reward you with bonuses – more so if you’re the first team to reach a certain level – that, again, pertain to the three things you desire for progress: planet movement, credits or zenithium. When you reach a new level on a technology track, you gain all the benefits of both that level and any beneath it as well, meaning some rewards can be claimed multiple times.

The last way to play a card is for diplomacy. This grabs your team the Leadership marker – which basically makes your hand size larger – and gives one of three benefits: credits, zenithium, or mobilisation (adding more cards from the top of the deck to your lanes). In the team game, you also get to pass up to two cards to your team-mate, which is extremely helpful because (again, only in the team game) you’re both limited in what planets you can play cards to: one side can handle Venus and Mercury; the other Jupiter and Mars. So if you’re the Venus and Mercury player, you might see the merit in passing a Jupiter card, for example, to your team-mate. Both players are allowed to play cards to the Terra (ie Earth) lane.

Neither technology nor diplomacy cost credits, but they do ask that the iconography – there is a fair bit of iconography in Zenith – matches the track or diplomatic effect in question. The planet ‘lanes’ cost money initially, but every card you have in a particular lane gives future cards played there a -1 deduction, making the expensive cards significantly cheaper and some cards even free to place: this is why the mobilisation mentioned above is helpful.

Once both players have had a turn and refilled their hand from the deck, it’s the opposing team’s turn. A team wins by gathering either planets of the same type, four of four different colours, or five of any colour at all.