Asteria is a two player, 4X strategic card war game, where players compete to achieve several potential victory goals while playing cards to Extract, Expand, Explore or Exterminate on a range of planets, competing for dominance.
The game is designed by Augusto Rocha, published by Brazilian company MeepleBR, with art by Harpy Studio.
It was added to the Board Game Arena catalogue on December 10th as part of the Winter of Game event.
In Asteria, players are fighting for control and trying to score three points by achieving various potential objectives. Players can outright win with a Military victory by controlling three planets, or piece together their three points through a combination of Exploration, Technology, or Economic. Any combination of the four goals that equals up to three or more points will do it.
Players draw from a shared deck of 38 action cards, each card having an Extract, Expand, Explore, or Exterminate option along the edges of the card, providing different abilities and different combat values. On their turn, a player can play one card to each of the planets in the center of the table.
The Extract ability of each card gives resources at a zero cost, though typically can have negative combat effect. The remaining three aspects of the cards will cost you the resource amount of the card to put into play.
When a card is played to a planet, that player will either place or increase their expansion marker along the combat track for the planet. When both player’s expansion marker meet along the track, a combat will take place at the end of that turn. A couple of factors can influence the outcome of a combat, but the player with the highest combat value will end up winning.
Play will continue until one player achieves the three victory point threshold and ends the game.
The tutorial on BGA for this game was created by Nekonyancer. The tutorial is a great way to learn the core aspects of the game and get you started. After running though the tutorial, I was perfectly confident jumping into a queue and playing in a game.
The Board Game Arena implementation is easy to use and work through the different part of each of the turns.
This has been a fun game and I’ve enjoyed it. If you like 4X style games and two player head type games, that this will definitely be something you’d want to check out. I like the aspect of playing the cards to the planets and deciding which aspect and ability of the cards to play when gives the game strategic depth.
For me, this is probably one that I won’t revisit much. Typically, two player only games aren’t my style, even though I mainly play many games at two players. I’m typically more interested in games that allow me to stretch my legs and try different realms of strategy.
In this game, while there are going to be a wide range of card combinations played to the different planets from both players, creating unique combinations and a different game experience, the pathways of this game will always be trying to win planets towards a Military victory, while also trying to pick up an additional points along the way.
As a small game, it does what it should do and does it in an engaging way, its just a little to small and constrained for my tastes.
As such, I am rating it on Board Game Geek, a 4/10. Not my style of game, but not a bad game.
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