Stop me if this sounds familiar: in the cold, isolated blackness of deep space, a freighter crew wakes up from suspended animation for find that their ship is crawling with bug-like monstrosities bent on their destruction...
If this sounds like a familiar science fiction franchise that starts with the letter "A," you're half right. Argo is a tile-laying game in which players race to be the first to evacuate their crew of astronauts while leaving their opponents to be food for the vicious alien invaders. Sort of.
Game play involves placing tiles to add to the maze of rooms and corridors that all future space stations will no doubt be, and moving your figures around in such a way that you get your pieces to the escape pods and your opponents do not. There are several game elements that make this more interesting than it sounds.
Most tiles can only accommodate one or two player figures, so if you move your piece onto a tile, you bump someone else off, and if this puts them on an overcrowded tile, its piece moves as well, often creating a chain reaction that can allow you to put your pieces in the best positions and your opponents in the worst.
Additionally, many tiles have special abilities that can be activated to make figures move faster, trade places, return to the board after being removed, and so on. The object is to move your pieces to the escape pod tiles and launch them, but each pod can only hold two figures, and the pods are worth more points the longer you wait before evacuating.
Most importantly, some tiles call for an alien creature figure to be added to the board. At the start of each player's turn, that player can move one of the aliens, and if it lands on a player's figure (or if a figure moves onto a tile containing an alien), that piece is removed, and the player who moved the alien earns a point for any figure (other than his or her own) that is devoured.
The catch is that the aliens earn points of their own based on how many astronauts they devour, and if they finish the game with more points than the winning player, then no one wins. The aliens earn more points for devoured pieces than the players do, so the game becomes a bit of a balancing act - you can't let the aliens eat too many of your opponent's pieces.
Each player piece has a unique ability - marines can kill aliens, explorers can move faster, robots can move past aliens without being attacked, and so on. It gives you quite a bit to think about, and the shuffled tiles are the only random element in the game so it's almost all strategy and tactics.
Rating: 3 (out of 5) A little too simple to be something that we'll play a lot, but it's a solid mid-weight game with a great theme that doesn't feel painted on.
