Superstore 3000

• Designer: Rodrigo Rego
• Publisher: Space Cowboys
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/4g810Nt
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to Superstore 3000, the retro-futuristic mall building game where you must build the tallest and most incredible mall to satisfy as many customers as possible. In Superstore 3000, each player builds their own mall by placing shop tiles and being the first to meet the criteria to collect the unique attraction tiles that will make your building even more exceptional.

In the year 2964, become a visionary mall engineer with the thrilling board game, Superstore 3000. Set against the backdrop of interstellar commerce, players race to construct the most customer-friendly and aesthetically pleasing shopping haven. Each round is a dive into strategic decision-making, from choosing the optimal Mall Elements from the innovative Dispenser 3000 to strategically positioning attractions to draw in more visitors.

This game is not only about building but also about foreseeing customer needs and cleverly managing your resources. The Dispenser 3000 enhances the tactical depth, requiring you to think ahead as you invest in valuable tiles. With over 96 Mall Elements to choose from and dynamic setup changes, no two games are alike, ensuring that each playthrough remains exciting and full of new challenges.

This game offers not just a play experience but an engaging narrative that blends commerce, architecture, and a hint of cosmic adventure. It’s perfect for anyone who loves strategy games with a creative twist. Whether you’re buying your first board game or adding to a growing collection, Superstore 3000 promises endless fun and strategic depth. Join the race to build the ultimate space mall and be the envy of the galaxy!

To set up, the Dispenser 3000 board is put on the table, the appropriate mall elements are chosen and shuffled, and then the spaces of the Dispenser are filled with random elements. In a 4p game, 2 pink Attraction cards and 4 purple Attraction cards are chosen at random, also randomizing for the side of each to be seen. Find the tiles that match these attractions and place them nearby.

Each player gets a random Main Entrance tile, a ruler, 3 starting money tiles, 3 customers, their individual Attraction tile and a random orange Individual attraction card.  The Main Entrance is placed on the table with the 3 customer tiles on the appointed spaces. This is the ground floor of your mall. The ruler is placed next to the starting tile (with the number 1 lining up with your entrance tile). 

On a turn, the active player only has two choices – build something or take money. 

Build a Mall Element – From the Dispenser 3000, add a yellow Food Court, Blue Hobby store, Green Fashion store or a Red Entrance to your mall.  If you take it from the bottom row, it’s free; things are more expensive as you move upwards.  Place the new element into your mall, placing it over your main entrance, over a docking bay, over another mall Element or over an Attraction’s platform.  Note that you cannot build an element on the ground floor nor can you build it if it is not supported underneath.  If you placed an Entrance, fill the empty slots with Customers.  Now, slide all the tiles down in the Dispenser and refill from the top.

Build an Attraction – if you have met the criteria to build an attraction (seen on its Attraction card), you can use your action to build said attraction. Place the Attraction tile in your mall following the usual rules – the base tile of the Attraction must be supported.

Build a Docking Bay – you can build a gray Docking Bay once you have 1 of each type of element in your mall, and you can build a brown Docking Bay once you have 2 of each type of element in your mall. Place the Docking bay on the ground floor of your mall.  You can now build things on top of it.  Many of them also come with a special effect on the tile.

Take Money – take either of the bottom-most tiles from the dispenser and flip it over to convert it to a bank note.  For each element in the same column of the dispenser that matches the color, get an additional Bank Note from the Bank.  Slide the tiles down and refill from the top.

Once you have taken your action, check to see if any Customers can get to the store they want (as seen next to their space on their Entrance tile).  Customers can only move orthogonally to three tiles, though Attraction tiles are not counted.  If there is a suitable store, move an appropriate Customer to that store and lay it down.  Each store can only have one Customer lying down in it.  If there are multiple eligible Customers that can occupy a store, you can choose which one moves.  Be sure to check each time you add a tile to your mall, especially an Attraction tile, as this may change what stores are reachable by your Customers.

Play continues until the end of a round where the last Mall Element is placed on the Dispenser OR when the last Common attraction is built.  All players will have the same number of turns.  Before scoring, all unsatisfied Customers are removed from your mall and all money is returned to the bank.  Scoring tokens are distributed:

• Rainbow tokens – given to the players with the most satisfied customers, ties broken by the highest satisfied customer
• Blue tokens – given to the players with the largest contiguous cluster of blue stores in their mall – either orthogonally adjacent or connected through an attraction tile.  Ties broken in favor of the highest satisfied customer in that group
• Yellow tokens – given to the players with the largest contiguous cluster of yellow stores in their mall – either orthogonally adjacent or connected through an attraction tile.  Ties broken in favor of the highest satisfied customer in that group
• Green tokens – given to the players with the largest contiguous cluster of green stores in their mall – either orthogonally adjacent or connected through an attraction tile.  Ties broken in favor of the highest satisfied customer in that group

Players sum the points on their balloon tokens as well as those found on tiles in their mall to get their final score.  The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the highest scoring Rainbow balloon token.

My thoughts on the game

The designer, Rodrigo Rego, designed one of my surprise hits from Spiel 2023, How Dare You – and I’m really pleased to see that this game is completely different from his previous hit.  Superstore 3000 is an interesting tile laying game because it involves the weirdly shaped attraction tiles that help make the topography of your futuristic mall so convoluted.  The way that these larger tiles break up the regular grid – but also do not block adjacencies – make your 2D mall feel a bit larger, closer to 2.6D.   Without these attractions, the tile-laying part is honestly pretty straightforward.

There is enough variety in the different tile types to keep the drafting interesting.  I do like the way that you gain money – it helps make a display clogged with tiles you might not want turn into something useful.   There also will probably be one or two times in the game where you can hate-draft against an opponent by converting the tile they desperately want into money for yourself.  

As you build your mall, you’ll be balancing the need to add more stores with the need to add more entrances and docks to provide more customers.  The docking bays also allow you to widen the footprint of your mall, and this can be helpful for some of the bonuses.  While you’re doing all of this, you’re also competing with the other players to reach the criteria needed to build those attractions.

The attractions offer a nice reward in points, but they also lead to increased options in adjacency as many of them provide multiple places to build off of – all of which are adjacent to each other.  Most of the winners for largest blob of a particular color end up using these attraction adjacencies.

The little acrylic customer pieces are adorable, and I actually enjoy pawing through the pile of figures to pick out the sort of customer that I think would want to shop at the book store or the interior decorating store…  The malls look super colorful on the table, and all of the artwork is vibrant and whimsical at the same time.

Superstore 3000 was a new discovery to me at Spiel 2024, and while I don’t know if it does anything particularly new; it is one of those games that just works.  All of the different components mesh well together and results in a very pleasing 40-50 minute game of mall planning.  It’s fun to watch your mall grow from the ground up and quite satisfying to see your patrons get delivered to their desired store and then lie down from the excitement.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4g810Nt

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Melissa – Our daughter and I tried this in Essen and liked it enough to pick up a copy – in German, but the components are definitely language-independent. We have since played it with three players as well. It’s not a ground-breaking game, but it’s very enjoyable, simple, and easy to set up, and plays comfortably in well under an hour. We quickly forgot the name and Space Mall 3000 it became. Like Dale, we like the little acrylic customer pieces and enjoy picking the right customer for the right shop – I noticed when we played this week that the Bigster made her own little “draw” pile with all of her favourite people. 

The attractions, in particular, offer plenty of replayability, with each requiring one of two different criteria in any given game. On these – on first play(s), it’s worth going over the prerequisites for attractions again once people have placed a few mall elements, to make sure that everyone understands what is required.

Our only question – which has seen the game renamed once again – was why the customers lie down once they come into the right shop. Clearly there is something nefarious going on. I’ll be over here, playing Only Murders in the Space Mall (3000).

Fraser: I haven’t taken a sharpie to the box yet, but it is definitely named Space Mall 3000 in our house, or maybe Only Murders in the Space Mall (although you don’t get points for murdered customers), not whatever the original name was.

Plenty of replayability given that you only play with a subset of attractions and all the docking bays are different.  The “customers” are so cute and very reminiscent of The Jetsons and Futurama based on the ones I have been allowed to look at so far.

There is ample opportunity to choose mall elements or fulfilling attractions based on what other people may want to do in the near future. Also the flow of the mall elements is quite dynamic, you may have customers (future victims?) who want an ice cream shop and they are just not coming out.  As Melissa said “It’s not a ground-breaking game, but it’s very enjoyable, simple, and easy to set up, and plays comfortably in well under an hour”.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Melissa, Fraser
• I like it. Dale Y, John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…