Sol: Last Days of a Star

Sol: Last Days of a Star is both a heroic and tragic undertaking. Somewhere in the distant future, a star is dying, on the verge of collapse. The players objectives are to harness what power they can from the star before it disappears forever, and the most successful manipulator of these solar waves will be declared the winner when it eventually expires…

All players begin with eight Sundiver ships in their personal player board (representing the Hull of your mothership) and three energy cubes. The board shows the star itself with five orbital layers around the centre. Players place their motherships on the convective layer – furthest from the centre – and put an Instability marker (the health of the star) at 13, from where it will count down to zero. You shuffle cards to form the instability deck: more on these shortly.

If the strategies and tactical play are not immediately evident, turns are reasonably straightforward, taking one of three actions: Move, Convert, or Activate. Moving is simply the matter of launching and/or moving your small Sundivers around the board: these are essentially workers you need present in certain places in order to do your bidding. You have a starting movement value of three points and can spend it launching from your mothership, traveling along any orbital path from section to section, or crossing into a different orbit, if there is a gate present.

A gate has to be built by someone, and that’s done using the Convert action. By assembling your Sundivers into particular patterns on the board, you can convert them into either a gate or one of three types of station: Energy Node, Sundiver Foundry or Transmit Tower. Any time your build a new station, you gain an additional movement point. If the terminology sounds complicated, worry not: each station does a simple job when it is activated.

To activate a station, a Sundiver must be present in the same sector. The Sundiver returns to your Hull, and Energy Nodes produce energy cubes, Sundiver Foundries build new Sundivers (costing energy cubes!) and Transmit Towers turn energy cubes into momentum: victory points, essentially. – You can even activate opponent’s stations, although your own are more productive as you receive the bonus for doing so, instead of someone else.

When your turn is over, your mothership orbits one sector around the star, and it’s the next player’s turn. As you may have surmised from the theme, though, there is a time pressure to proceedings. When players convert or activate, it usually triggers one or more cards flipping from the Instability deck – if a solar flare card is revealed, the instability marker moves one space closer to zero, and the game moves closer to its fiery conclusion. The closer to the sun you are when activating or converting, the more cards that flip. But you want to be closer to the sun, because that’s where your stations are at their most productive!

Each suit in the instability deck also has a special power – we won’t go into these in depth, but basically whenever you flip cards you have the option of keeping one (and only one!) to cash in on a future turn. Although these seem peripheral to the main event on the board, clever use of them can be key to victory.

Finally – we missed out one option available when taking a movement action. If you sundiver can reach the star itself, you can hurl it into the flames and harness the momentum as points: 2 for every sundiver lost (and they are lost – they’re gone for the entire game) plus a point if the cards revealed are solar flares.

The whole thing amounts to a kind of uncertain race, where there are two ways to score points: sacrificing sundivers into the star itself, or activating Transmit Towers. The latter is slightly less immediate and involves a bit of planning. The former, whilst being easier to achieve, relies on the game finishing sooner (the last solar flare card coming out) rather than later, as if you run out of sundivers you are effectively a spectator from then on, hoping someone will trigger the game end…