Noobs in Space Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Noobs in Space, a board game published by Kosmos. A cooperative game in which you work with your fellow newbie astronauts to solve puzzles and tasks.

Sometimes, a game sells itself to you just in its name. I was asked “Do you want to review Noobs in Space?” Knowing nothing else about it, I did not even look at the BGG link before saying yes, solely because of the name. Only later did I discover it was a cooperative game, which was really icing on the cake.

Noobs in Space is a cooperative game for 3-5 players which can be played in series of 10-15 minute sessions or all at once over about 2 hours. Now, let’s look at PIGS—IN—er, I mean, NOOBS—IN—SPACE!!!

Thematically, the concept of this game is you are new recruits on a ship where there are many things that go wrong, and you must work together to solve the issues. Not counting the special training exercise, this amounts to 8 separate puzzles to solve in a “complete” game. Each puzzle is unique and separate from the others, so you can do them all in one sitting, or separately over many sessions. Each one can take 10-to-15 minutes, so any approach is ultimately reasonable, depending on your time available.

When setting up for a puzzle, You identify the subset of the game’s 120 cards which show the the number of the puzzle that you are attempting. The rulebook has a chart that tells you how many there should be for each, so you can double check that you have everything (there are around 30 for each puzzle). Many cards end up being used in several puzzles, but in different ways. Each player gets an equal number of cards, and from that moment on you cannot show each other your hands, but you can describe things to each other.

Each puzzle consists of a number of tasks that must be completed in order. These tasks are on cards in players’ hands. They will ask you to do things, like play cards in certain layouts or orders, count the number of types of cards, or say different phrases on the cards (and more). Once