Supernova is a game where each player is a civilization living in a solar system with a sun that is about to go supernova. Each player takes control of a unique race and must abandon their planet and make a mad rush for new solar systems before their home is destroyed. The thing is each other player is trying to do the same thing so conflict will most definitely happen. You need to carefully balance your investment in technologies to be the victor.

Components
The art by Mike Doyle is really top notch as you will see in the images throughout this review. The components themselves are also very high quality; the cards feel nice, the tokens are thick, nice plastic resource units (aka money). Now, this production does appear to be rushed, as there is a good chance when you receive it your ink will still be wet. You are definitely going to want to let it sit out and dry for a day or two before punching it. My boards were still slightly warped, and some of my tokens that come pre-cut in the box were very off centre. I did sent a quick e-mail out to Torben at Valley Games and he promised he’d have me fixed up good as new. This issue does seem to be only something the early adopters will see, so I don’t think you should put too much weight on it.

What exactly comes in the box?

Courtesy of Kon Wacht

Research Cards
A deck of Research Cards. These can be researched during your purchase phase for 1RU. They have varying abilities such as adjusting the orbit of the moon, moving a moon, teleportation, switching places with another player, refreshing your hand of battle cards, and so on. Some of them are well worth the 1RU, whereas others may be a little more situational. One interesting mechanic is you cannot use any research cards the turn you buy them; you must wait until your next turn.
Courtesy of Oliver Harrison

Battle Cards
A deck of Battle Cards. These are one of my favourite parts of the game. I won’t go into depth about the combat in this review, as Richard Stockton did a good battle mechanic review here. Basically the cards come in four suits. One is silver, and contains only 1s - these are also wild cards. The others are Green, Orange, and Blue and contain the values 2-5 as well some special cards. These special cards are sometimes tricky to follow but they have powers like switching your highest for the opponents highest, making the opponent discard their highest, or have a variable value based on the highest card you’ve played. One really nice thing about the Battle Cards, is not only are the suits distinguished by colour, but also by shape - this allows colourblind people to play without any issues.
Courtesy of Oliver Harrison

Player Screen & Control Markers
Each player gets a screen to hide RUs and VPs, and a big stack of control markers. The control markers are placed on the board to show which hexes you control and by the end of the game creates a very interesting look as the colours spread out.
Courtesy of usagi-san

Player Mat
Each player also gets a player mat, which contains 4 columns to show their advancement in technologies as well as the costs for items and a turn summary, very handy.
Courtesy of Oliver Harrison

Resource Units
There are resource units, which are nice chunks of plastic to use as money.
Courtesy of Oliver Harrison

Map Boards
And then there are the starboards. These are large pieces, each containing a planet, and smaller ones which will house exploration markers that can give you benefits - or have negative effects such as losing the rest of your control markers that turn or losing an RU.  Having these as separate pieces allows you to customize the game slightly each play - as well as scale the size of the galaxy to the number of players.  There is also a Supernova tile which sits in the middle of the gameboard to track the turns as well as the starting point for all civilizations.
Courtesy of Rafal Szczepkowski

Other Components
A few of the other components are tiny triangles for VPs. Each different denomination is a different size as well as colour, and the value is clearly printed on it. While very functional, they could have been slightly larger. Planet Power Cards which are each linked to a planet tile and give the owner a special power, which is usually a boost to a technology. Desperation cards which are distributed once all planets are occupied to the players without a planet under their control. And a few other misc. counters including planets, moons, and technology markers.

Gameplay Summary

On your turn you start by refreshing your battle cards up to your maximum (starts as 4, but technologies can increase this). Then you collect your income, a base of 1 RU pus 2 RU for every moon you currently control. If you control a moon, but another player controls the planet that the moon is orbiting, you must pay that player a 1RU tax.

After this you receive your control tiles for placement (again, starts as 4 but can be increased through technologies).  The first type of placement is fortification, this is when you stack one of your tiles onto an existing one of your tiles to increase it’s height, and therefore it’s strength in battle. You can also just expand into empty space or battle. You can only expand off of the centre Supernova tile, or off of one of you existing tiles. I’ll go into more detail about battling in the next section. After  you’ve placed your cards and had your battles you refresh up to 4 battle cards (not your maximum).

You now have a purchase phase where you can buy/play research cards, increase your technologies, or buy battle cards. Buying battle cards does not increase the amount you hold, it just lets you get a better choice of what is in your hand. Buying a research card is 1RU and you just draw the top card for the research deck and it will be available for play during your next turn. Finally you can increase your technologies, these cost 1RU per level. So if you wanted to purchase level 1 Shields, it would cost 1RU.  On your next turn if you wanted to upgrade to level 2 Shields, it would cost 2RU and so on. You can only increase each specific technology once per turn, but you can do as many different techs as you would like.

After this is over, if you didn’t battle you can discard one battle card from your hand to draw a replacement and then your turn is complete.

One interesting mechanic is the Desperation Cards. Once all planets are occupied any player who doesn’t currently have a planet, gets a desperation card. This can be used once each of their turns and gives them 3 choices. They can get 1 extra RU, 1 extra control tile, or refresh their hand of battle cards to their maximum. This is really quite powerful and helps the people who fall behind.

Battle

The way battle works is the attacker will play from 1-4 cards face down, and then the defender does the same. This goes back and forth until both players pass or they each have 4 face down cards (the maximum).  You can’t just play any card from your hand though, the suits mentioned previously dictate what you can and can not play. Basically, each ‘set’ of battle cards need to either be all different suits or all of the same. The Silver 1’s are wild. If you would like to play one of the special battle cards, it needs to be played alongside a card of the same suit (wild card doesn’t cut it). Once this is done you resolve any of the special cards, and add the modifiers. The attacker adds his Weapons technology bonus, the defender adds their Shields technology bonus. The height difference in the control marker stacks is also a bonus. Whoever has the higher stack gets +1 per tile height difference to a maximum of +2.
If the attacker wins, he keeps his control marker over the opponent and now controls that area, he also gets 1RU. If he loses, he discards the tile and continues on with his turn. Both players draw 1 battle card after the fight.

Technologies

Technologies consist of Weapons (for attacking), Shields (for defending), Engines (To get additional tiles to expand your civilization), and Comms (which allow you to hold extra battle cards).

Supernova

So, the game is called Supernova, what’s the deal? Well, after each turn there is a possible chance of a solar flare. A coin is flipped and if the flare side comes up each player does a closed fist bid to control the flare. Whoever wins gets to burn off some tiles next to the centre Supernova tile, this is variable based on the current round you are in. Two for the first phase, three for the second, four for the third, and five for the final supernova.
The last round of each phase is mandatory super flare, no flipping necessary.
Once the tiles are burnt, whoever won the bid gets to decide the new start player for the next round (and possibly rounds if the possible solar flare is never triggered).

At the end of each phase there is a mid-game scoring. You get 5 points per planet and 3 points per moon. Once the final phase is complete the Supernova goes off and the final game scoring occurs. Planets and moons score the same here, but you also get 1 point per controlled hex on the board, and 1 point per RU.

Conclusion

I love this game, I think it’s great fun. It can run a bit long though, but there is an official short game variant to help with this problem. The short game has quite a different feel from the full game as there aren’t enough planets for each player to peacefully reside so this often causes more conflict throughout the game - which is more than welcome by me!

Another downside to the game is there can be quite a bit of downtime. Oftentimes one player may go on a war rampage and there will be a lot of combat going on, possibly not involving you. This could mean it will be quite awhile before it comes around to you for your turn. This never really bothered me, because I’m a big fan of how the combat system works and loved to watch as two players duelled it out.

Some of the planets are definitely better than others. For example, one planet is +1 Comms, where another planet is +2 Shields and another is +2 Weapons. Now, the Shield/Weapon planets may seem very powerful, and they are. But, there is also a downside as far as I understand it. When you have these planets, it’s now much more expensive to raise your technologies. For example, if you were at 1 Shield, and then picked up the +2 Shield planet. You’d be at level 3 Shields, so to upgrade your shield technology would cost you 4RUs. Let’s say you pay those 4RUs and then lose the planet, you will end up back down to level 2 shields, and therefore well over payed for your boost in shield technology. It helps balance out the powerful planets, especially near the beginning of the game.

Being first in turn order can really hose you, sure you will have the best chance to collect money from your moons, but depending on how the other players are, you might lose a lot of your position on the board. If due to the flip for the solar flare it doesn’t come up for awhile, you could be stuck in that position for up to 3 turns.

Another thing I really enjoyed was when you are in desperation, you can go all out and attack someone to deplete their hand of battle cards (and your own), use the desperation card to refresh your hand and then cream him.

Don’t really know what to compare this game to, but if the game sounds interesting at all to you, I would definitely give it a try.

Courtesy of Richard Stockton
An example of the board at the end of a game. Just beautiful.