Stellar Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Stellar, a two player set collection game published by Renegade Game Studios. Stellar has players trying to collect sets of cards for points.

In the late 1970s, Bill Murray (backed by a young Paul Schafer) had a great SNL skit where he added lyrics to the Star Wars theme, including my favorite verse:

Star Wars
If they should bar wars,
Please let these Star Wars
Stay.

With these lyrics in my head, I finally convinced my wife to give Stellar a try. Stellar is a two-player card duel that packs a deceptively strategic set-collection game into a peppy (30 minutes or maybe even less) and portable package. Stellar was designed by Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback and is published by Renegade Games.

A game of Stellar consists of 11 very short rounds, followed by a lot of end-game scoring. This is followed by one of the two players regretting at least one key choice along the way which led to defeat. Usually, in my games with my wife, that regret was emanating from me, not her, because, well, math is hard.

Players are essentially asked to balance three goals at once. You want to get a lot of star icons onto your telescope in one suit and then also have many consecutive cards of that same suit in your notebook. But you also want to have higher valued cards on the telescope than your opponent. Typically, the more stars a card has (good for one goal) the lower the value of the card (bad for the other).

There’s a third consideration, which is that there are also ten “easy” points to be had by making sure you’ve got at least one of each suit on your telescope. This tends to work against the goal of maximizing your points from maxing out the stars in one suit. Of course, this is multiplied by the length of your best consecutive run in that same suit. You cannot score all the points, and so to be stellar at Stellar, you really need to focus on just a few options. Go as hard as possible at scoring a ton of points and hope it’s enough to win.

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