Designers: Katarzyna Cioch, Sylwia Smolińska, Wojciech Wiśniewski, Mateusz Wolski

Artist: Tomasz Bolik

Publisher: Portal

Players: 2-5

Age: 8+

Time: 20 minutes (per scenario)

Review copy provided by Portal

Review by Jonathan Franklin (played six times with different players playing the AI & multiple scenarios)

You are stranded in space with four fellow astronauts. The players are in charge of getting the correct astronauts to the correct rooms in the space station. Sometimes that is not enough and they need to have numbered keys with them. If you get them to the right rooms with the right keys, you escape.

Oddly enough, none of you has any clue where the astronauts and keys should be. Only the AI knows. If you despise AI, just change the name to Ground Control and start calling the players ‘Major Tom’. Like in Mysterium and other cooperative one-with-many games, the AI (another player) needs to guide the other players to get the configuration correct within a certain number of rounds. Can your team of humans and AI live to try another mission? You’ll know after playing AI Space Puzzle.

While thematic in some ways, it is easiest to explain the game a bit more concretely, then we will get back to theme. AI Space Puzzle is a scenario-driven game where the players are given the problem and the AI is given the solution. The AI communicates with small tiles. Which tiles are available and how many may be used each turn depends on the scenario. A turn is when the AI gives the players a tile configuration and the players use their actions. The process repeats itself until the number of turns in the scenario is consumed or the players declare this is their ‘guess’. They only get one guess, so the players have to be sure.

In the center of the table is a 4×4 grid of cards that make up the space station. Each room can have 0-4 things in it. One room has all four, four rooms have three of the four, etc so each room has a unique set of items in it. These are the 16 possible rooms the four astronauts need to be in. There are six colors of astronauts, but only four are part of each solution. Since tiles vary by scenario, the AI might have tiles with astronaut colors (or not), key shapes (or not), key numbers (or not), etc.

The AI has a card that represents the space station that is hidden from the other players. It shows the four colors and which rooms they need to be in. In addition, it shows the shape and number of the key that may be needed.

If you imagine four shapes and five possible numbers (2, 3, 4, 5, or 6), that means 20 possible keys. In the game, the keys are dice and they can be rotated to show the number, but are never rolled, The shape of the key is tracked on a board.

The heart of the game is the AI trying to use these tiles to communicate with the other players without words. The scenario chosen also defines the number of actions the players have each turn. With those actions, they may do any of the following,

Move an astronaut + their die from the side of the board to any of the 16 rooms. Die is set to 1.
Remove an astronaut + their die from any of the rooms to the side of the board.
Move an astronaut from one room to another, keeping the die at the same value.
Change the die number of one astronaut by rotating the die.

It is important to note that swapping the positions of two astronauts takes two actions, not one.

I greatly enjoyed every play of this game as both AI and player. Unlike many games of this genre, having multiple players trying to interpret the AI’s tiles is important. It is easy for people to see the configurations differently. Is the AI using the checkmark to show something is correct? Or are they using it as an arrow to get the players to move something? What seems obvious at first may be very very wrong. At the same time, the AI is listening to what the players are saying and can use their ideas in the next clue.

Unlike many games of this genre, there are a few rules and aspects that set it apart. Unlike many limited communication games, this one has avoided all fuzzy rules. There may not be any conventions or agreements on what things mean. The tiles are the only thing that communicates – no talking, nodding, gesticulating. Put up the screen & arrange the tiles – that is all. If you want to break these rules, all it will do is remove the fun and creativity from the game. A truly Pyrrhic victory.

This is an elegant and fun design with scenarios and configuration cards for infinite play. Strangely enough, while the game is minimalist, some of the additions to the game, like the tracker board for the players is fancier than it needed to be and detracted from the experience. In the end, we removed the board from its angled holder and put the top piece on the table. Instead of using the countdown cube, we used a d10. I am not saying this to disparage the design, but to suggest that the box is larger than it needs to be for the game inside.

At the same time, the art on the six colored astronauts is adorable and the theme does come through even though the game is abstract. Instead of basic geometric shapes, the keys are almost corporate space logos. So you can say that the red astronaut needs the round logo with the five die in space a2. As it is a 4×4 grid, we used chess notation to describe the spaces.

Another comment is that you should not go into this thinking the puzzles and the game are for kids or trivial. The scenarios ramp up quite a bit and if you are unimpressed, just go up a level. A bit like Codenames, all the solution cards the AI uses can be rotated and have X on them that can be assassins or can be where a fifth astronaut needs to be. At the same time, you need to communicate all this without the color tiles and within 7 turns. This means you have seven turns to get four correctly colored astronauts to the correct locations with the correct keys and dice numbers as well as a fifth one on a specific different location.

In closing, I want to emphasize that each scenario has challenges that force the AI to use the tiles they are given differently. Maybe for one scenario, you want tiles to slightly overlap or be off-center but in another one, you want to stack three of them and have something pointing at a fifth tile. There is great flexibility with this system and much of the game is creating this shared tile language.

Due to each player wanting to play the AI, it can often take longer than 20 minutes, so consider it ~20 minutes per scenario.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Justin B (five plays): While I enjoyed AI Space Puzzle, I definitely enjoyed it more as the AI. As a non-AI player, I was still engaged but we found that the AI role can be tough stuff as the difficulty ramps up. Like the best games of this category, it was always a fist-pumping thrill to win a scenario with limited information, so the fun factor is there and games are over relatively quickly. I’ve already moved it out of my collection, which tells me this is more “like it” territory than “love it.”

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
I love it! Jonathan F. (esp. at higher difficulties)
I like it. Justin B
Neutral.
Not for me…