One Small Step Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review One Small Step, a worker placement and resource managment game produced by Academy Games. One Small Step puts two or four players against each other in the great space race.

The year is 1957. The first Frisbees are sold, Elvis Presley purchases Graceland, and the USSR launches Sputnik 1, which kicks off the Space Race, an escalating competition between the Soviet Union and the United States to further space flight and be the first to land a man on the moon.

One Small Step by Academy Games takes the excitement and tension of this moment in time and encapsulates it into a worker placement and resource management board game for 2-4 players. When the game puts the fates of nations into your hands, which space program will prevail?

With two players, one person plays as the Soviet Union and the other as the United States. With four, players work in teams, each member controlling either engineers or administrators for their team’s nation. The game ends when one team reaches the moon, and whoever has earned the most victory points at that time wins. Players accomplish this by allocating engineers and administrators to action blocks on the Earth portion of the board, collecting the resources indicated.

Through worker placement, players can draft development and astronaut cards that will help them along their way, or collect the resource tokens that will allow them to accomplish their missions. Completed missions are how players collect the best rewards and victory points, as well as moving themselves closer towards the moon. Resources are one-time use early on, but can be upgraded to be renewable as more actions are unlocked, allowing players to plot out a more effective engine.

The first nation to land on the moon gets a point bonus, but won’t necessarily secure victory. There are a lot of paths to winning, including effectively managing your space program’s media image, which can also score you advantages and victory points. There are dozens of choices to be