Mothership, for those times when you just want to punch a starship in the mouth

Sometimes, I get a hankering to play a complex, 4x-style space exploration game. Then, a couple hours in, I realize that all I really wanted to do was blow shit up. Thankfully, now I have Mothership, a board game custom built for those times when all I want to do is punch a starship in the mouth.

The Kickstarter campaign for Mothership caught my eye for one reason, and one reason alone: It’s a miniatures-based strategy board game with a blistering 40-minute playtime. That’s not possible, I thought to myself. But, lo and behold, designer Peter Sanderson has gone and done it.

Charlie Hall/Polygon

Mothership is a game for 2-6 players. Inside the box is a double-sided gameboard and 42 plastic spaceships with transparent plastic stands. Players go to their separate corners, season deep space with a few asteroid fields, plop down a handful of planets and get to work blasting each other to smithereens. What makes the game so dynamic are the motherships themselves. Each is controlled from a sideboard with dozens of wooden markers. Move the markers around to reconfigure your energy systems and you’re able to move, shoot and defend better than any other ship on the table.

Even when you’ve lost all your fighters and bombers, your mothership can still land a killing blow and win the day.

There’s a bit of rock, paper scissors to it all of course. Bombers can’t damage fighters, and fighters can’t do much damage at all. But what that does is force you to be bold and commit your ships in decisive engagements. If they get blown up, it’s okay. You can reset and play another game by the time you’ve poured a fresh beer and refilled the pretzels.

Charlie Hall/Polygon

The basic version of the game also has a tech tree. Players can use resources, earned from controlling planets, to upgrade their ships. Of course, if you want to play with the kids, just forget about the tech tree entirely and start rolling dice.

I’m less excited about the $79 price point for the limited edition, the only edition currently available. Yes, it’s got pretty great miniatures that are just detailed enough for a quick and effective paint job to be applied. Yes, the pack-ins are top notch. But that’s a lot of money to pay for such a ... I hesitate to say simple, but there’s no other word for it.

Charlie Hall/Polygon

For your money, Mothership also has an advanced ruleset. There’s a deck of artifacts in the box that grants a handful of unusual powers, like increased speed or defenses. There’s a way to play with victory points, which has the tendency to punish those who turtle up in the corner of the map. It even has a single-player mode, with simplified rules for handling AI. There’s also a $6 add-on die that brings random events, like pirate raids, into the game.

But even with all these extra options, it’s going to be hard to play for more than 40-minutes before you finish a game.

That’s not a bug. In my opinion, that’s an extraordinary feature.