A Message From the Stars Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review A Message from the Stars, a cooperative deduction game published by Allplay. In A Message from the Stars, an alien is tryign to decipher messages from the scientists.

Aliens have made contact with humanity. But are these mysterious visitors here to make peace or war? To find out, the two races must figure out how to communicate with one another through clever clues and code solving.

A Message from the Stars is a cooperative game for 2-8 players, with a playtime of 45 minutes.

One player will act as the alien while the others take on the role of the scientists. The object of the game is for the alien to solve the scientists’ three word clue and for the scientists to solve the alien’s three word clue, along with a six letter cipher. To determine the mystery words each side draws a message card and rolls the die three times, which will indicate the three words from the card to be used. To determine the cipher the alien draws six letter cards and places them on the slots of their player screen.

Sides then alternate giving one word clues to each other. When the alien writes a clue they also assign a value to their word based on how many and which cipher letters were used in the clue. After reviewing the alien’s clue, the scientists then write their own clue and pass it to the alien who, in turn, calculates its value based on the cipher letters in the word, and passes it back. Play alternates in this way for four rounds. The goal is for each side to give clues related to their secret words, but the alien also wants to incorporate letters from their cipher, while the scientists will use the feedback on their words to help them solve the cipher.

After four rounds each side guesses the other side’s three secret words and the scientists guess the cipher letters. For each correct guess, the players collectively score one point, with twelve being the highest possible score.

There is also team vs. team variant, in which players split into two groups, assigning one