A Message From the Stars

• Designer: Clarence Simpson
• Publisher: allplay
• Players: 2-8
• Age: 11+
• Time: 45 minutes 
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4kdMCFs
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In A Message From The Stars, a team of scientists seeks to decipher cryptic messages from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Set against a backdrop of cosmic mystery, players take on the roles of brilliant scientists tasked with decoding a series of perplexing satellite transmissions. These transmissions are believed to contain vital messages from an alien race that could hold the key to the destiny of Earth. The catch? The messages are incomprehensible, written in an entirely unknown alien language.

Using engrossing deduction mechanics, players will collaborate with their fellow scientists to send messages back to the extraterrestrial senders. By exchanging these messages, you hope to unravel the intricate linguistic code that conceals the true intentions of the alien entity. Each interaction yields a numerical value, a piece of the puzzle that you’ll need to solve the riddle of the alien language.

Players can engage in cooperative gameplay, where all scientists pool their collective intellect to crack the alien code and unveil the hidden message. Alternatively, delve into team play, with two alien players sending messages across the galaxy.  The future of interstellar relations lies in your hands!

While the game gives rules for both cooperative and competitive modes, I will explain mostle the coop rules.  To start, one player is designated as the Alien. The Alien gets their own message card which has a Mad Libs like sentence at the top.  A d6 is rolled three times to get the words in each of the three columns to fill in the blanks in said sentence.   

All of the other players are the Scientists. They get a big screen to hide behind, and they also get their own message card.  The d6 is again rolled three times to determine their own Message.  If you have the very nice expansion bits, you will get a full set of dice for each side as well as three dice to use and keep in the dice/card holder.  

The goal of the game is for each side (The Alien and the Scientists) to guess as many of the three words from the other side’s card.  Additional points will be scored for each letter in the Alien’s Cipher that the Scientists can work out.

Wait, a Cipher?  This is also created in the setup.  There is a deck of letter cards which is shuffled.  Cards are flipped off the top of the deck and placed into the first matching open space in the Cipher.  There are three categories:

• Trust (1 green and 2 grey/red cards)
• Amplify (1 green and 1 grey/red)
• Suspicion (any color)

There is a restriction that there can only be one Red letter in the entire cipher.

The game will be played over four rounds.  The Alien goes first in the round.  The Alien takes a transmission card and writes down a word on it along with its “cipher score”.  You can use just about any word (or made up word) that you like – but you cannot use any words from your message card.

The Cipher Score is calculated as follows.  First, add one point for each time a Trust Letter is found in the word.  Then, double the score for each time an Amplify Letter is in the word.  Finally, if the Suspicion Letter is in the word (any number of times), the score value becomes negative.

So, if your board was this

Trust: O, P W

Amplify: D

Suspicion: N

The word OPINIONATED would be worth:  -6 points.   (1+1+1) * 2 * -1

With the same cipher, DOMINION would be worth: -4 points   (1+1) * 2 * -1

ALLPLAY would be worth: 1 point

Back to the turn, so the Alien gives a card with a word and its score to the Scientists.  The Scientists then get to try to figure out how that word generates the score.  Each Scientist has their own little dry erase board to make notes and try to figure out the points.  Whenever they are done working, the second part of the turn happens.  In this part, the Scientists write any word on a transmission card, show it to the Alien who then records the score down of that word.  More discussion (and/or gnashing of teeth) can then happen.

This process is repeated four times.  At the end of the four rounds, the two sides now see how well they communicated.

• Alien guesses the words in the Scientist Message – for each correct guess, score 1 point  (Wait, how would they do this?!  Generally, the Alien will have to use the four words suggested by the Scientists on their Transmission cards to figure out which three wordrs comprise the message)
• Scientists guess the words in the Alien Message – for each correct guess, score 1 point
• Scientists guess the Trust, Amplify and Suspicion Letters – for each correct guess, score 1 point

A perfect score is 12 points.  

If you want to play competitively, split into teams – each with their own Alien and Scientist(s).  The Aliens use the same cipher, but get their own message cards.  Each Scientist team also gets their own message card.  The game is played over only three rounds.  Aliens show their transmissions (and scores) openly.  The Scientists communicate only with the Alien on their team (and this is in private).  After three rounds, guesses are made, and the team with the better score wins.

My thoughts on the game

A Message From the Stars is an interesting sort of word game – as it really adds in some math/logic puzzling into the mix.  You only have four chances to propose a word (regardless of which side you are on), so you need to make them count.  The tricky part is… not only are you trying to come up with words that give easily deciphered scores, but you’re also trying to use those words to somehow clue at the three words in your hidden message.

The words on the message cards are well chosen.  Many of those words are related, and it will take a fair bit of brainpower to come up with Transmission words that both give you good cipher information as well as distinguishing between the varied word choices in the three columns.

The flow of the game is one of fits and starts.  There is a lot of quiet thinking going on here, and that translates into a fair bit of downtime – especially if you’re the Alien.  At least the Scientists get to cogitate with each word in each transmission.  The Alien only calculates the score of a word for half of the game, and otherwise sits and watches the Scientists work.  I suppose that the Alien really should be working on their next work while the Scientists are trying to figure out their own previous transmission….

The Scientists can fall prey to the bane of cooperative games – the quarterback.  Here, there is nothing stopping any player from reaching the mathematical solutions/conclusions the fastest, and then this person pretty much drives the Scientist bus by themselves to Scrabble Town.

For me, the solution for this is to play either a strictly 2 player game or play a four-play competitive game.  As long as there are no teams of Scientists, there are no quarterbacking issues, and everyone can make their own conclusions about the arithmetic in our stars.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Alison Brennan: I’ve only played the co-op version where one player has secret letters in different categories they want the team to work out. The means to do that is by giving a word and declaring how many points the word is worth – the categories make letters be positive, negative, or multipliers. There are other frequency rules that can be applied as well so a well-chosen word will allow a ton of letter eliminations to be made. And then you feed back a word to the leader to get a score, which will help further, while also trying to provide clues back to the leader so they can eliminate 15 of the 18 words the team were given. Get everything right for the win. All of which makes for quite the secretive conversation on which is the best word to proceed with – they’re written, not spoken, until agreed. I’m not sure how much play is in it given how thinky and quiet it is, but I certainly enjoyed the novelty and cleverness enough to play again if it was on offer.

Erik Arneson: Having a great time while playing A Message From the Stars depends on having a group of players where no one feels compelled to, as Dale nicely put it, “drive the Scientist bus by themselves to Scrabble Town.” I’m lucky to have a great group and we’ve played several times – enjoying it every time. There’s a lot to like here.

Dan B. I played it cooperatively and liked it fine that way. I see Dale’s point but even if one person on the team can do the logic faster other players can still contribute by coming up with words to try. If some players are much worse than the others at both logic and words then they probably shouldn’t be playing a logic word game together, but I don’t think that’s a flaw in the game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Erik Arneson
• I like it. Dale Yu (2p, 4p team), Alison, Dan B., Steph H
• Neutral. Dale Yu (cooperative)
• Not for me…

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