Card to kill: Astro Emporia

As with many groupees bundles, often I end up with games that feel less like pure entertainment titles and more ones that reminds me of my formative years playing games on early Apple PCs in the 'computer lab'. Edutainment, like Oregon Trail, was an interesting way of teaching kids, given kids are stupid and don't realize how enjoyable progressive learning can feel.

Also because early school is random and sucks, but whatever. So, Astro Emporia to me feels a lot less like a game for consenting adults and more like a game to reach children the basics of trading. And I do the basics.

On a basic level you own a freighter, you fly around your colorful cartoony solar system buying goods. There are various tiers of goods, but they all evenly take up space in your freighter - 100 units of scrap are nearly worthless and take up as much space 100 units of nanobots which are extremely valuable. The goal is to buy low and sell high, using the space available to you and splitting it up. The game doesn't seem to offer much in the way of information about what will be cheap or expensive, or even bought and sold, on other planets but prices tend to be generally relative within each given game. Which means as you're out for the first couple turns selling scrap, wood and iron, you need to pay attention to prices to try to get a feeling for what low and high actually are.

The basic game gives you 30 turns to make as much money as you can, and 30 turns is about right, as you start running into space issues and burning turns on being unable to sell top tier items because a given planet can't or won't pay enough for them. There is no difference between worlds on the map in terms of distance, and as far as I can tell no random events other than the core randomness of the game. It doesn't seem like the planets are especially different from each other, but they claim to be. That's it. You buy and sell, and then you stop playing when your cards stop dropping. It's not a bad couple of minutes figuring out the system and getting the hang of it, but there just isn't enough depth to really keep you going.

The art style is simple, clean and cartoony. The animation is good, what animation there is, which is to say the planets rotate and your little space ship putters around. The sound does the job, but the music actually gets a little annoying in parts, and I liked the sound track to Master of Orion 2, so there's that.

As with a lot of games, there's nothing really wrong with Astro Emporia but there is also nothing really right about it either. I think it would be sort of cute to give to a kid to play for a couple hours as they figure the system out, and I like the basic ideas ... But there just isn't enough. If you expanded out the basic ideas into a more fully fleshed trading game with maybe some ship upgrades and some governmental institutions to deal with, well, it starts to sound like a completely different game.

Maybe they'll make like, an Astro Emporia 2 with more actual game. As is, like I said, it's not a bad game for giving to a kid for a weekend. In fact, that might have been the idea.