3rd Jan 2026 Games Day - SETI
by Robin. Sun 4 Jan (Updated at Sun 4 Jan)SETI: Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence was one of the most-played games at the club last year (one of 15 games logged 3 times or more), and is off to a flyer again this year with 2 tables playing it on Saturday, and another one listed for next week. So I guess a fair few of you have played it already, but I hadn't, so here are my thoughts.
I'm not normally a fan of "space" games, as I struggle to relate to the theme, but not so with this one. The word "SETI" brings back memories of the early 2000s, when my Dad downloaded SETI@home and his home PC would spend the evenings ticking over telescope data in an early example of volunteer distributed computing. Glancing over at it, we'd see a little tracker graph showing what it had found, which was inevitably nothing - but there was always a slight thrill that it might suddenly discover aliens.
So, thematically, this felt more like Endeavor: Deep Sea than any space game. And its gameplay it was quite reminiscent of that too, as the random different configurations could result in completely different games (the different layouts for EDS, the different aliens for SETI). Like EDS, it felt like a fairly benevolent Eurogame, where most actions seemed to get you good stuff of one form or another, but you could do a lot better by stringing them together properly. So we went around discovering stuff, just up in the sky rather than under the sea, and used its powers to do better stuff.
Other than the SETI@home trivia, the only thing I knew about SETI prior to last week was that Ed liked it. So what? - Ed likes lots of games. Then I read the "game overview" bit of the rules, that explained that you get income between rounds, and then take as many actions as you want to (and can afford to) in the round before passing. Oh no, I thought, it's another Tapestry. (For those of you who haven't played Tapestry, I've basically just told you what it is - the more income you get, the more stuff you can do, and so the more points you score, and Ed really likes Tapestry.)
I've never got into Tapestry, basically because it demands a level of mental discipline to play it that I find boring: it's more fun to see a great move and do it now than to patiently build an engine while nothing seems to be happening. So I couldn't be bothered to play that way in this game either. But luckily for me, this one seems to be better balanced, so there are rewards for getting ahead early on that counterbalance the benefits of having a huge income later in the game.
At our table, we had the players to test out these various approaches: we played with Dave and Roald, visiting us from Luton and London respectively. New to the club, but not at all new to SETI, it seems. Dave was quoting various stats about the relative value of different resources, while Roald was happy to offer seemingly limitless tactical guidance to Kevin and me, both of whom were playing for the first time. When I played Endeavor: Deep Sea for the first time, I was very helpfully tutored through the game by Andrew H, but Roald took this to a whole new level.
In between all that, Roald told me that he had a reputation for lagging behind early on, then coming back strongly at the end of the game. So he was our benchmark for playing this game the Tapestry way, ie. spending the first couple of rounds just building up income; while Dave was more along my lines, playing for the now. And in this game at least, playing for the now carried the day, with Dave and me finishing comfortably ahead of the others.
I can see it needn't always turn out that way. There is a balancing mechanism whereby scoring quick points allows you to score more at end-game scoring, offsetting the value of income late in the game, and that will always be there. But how our game played out (and all others I guess) came down to the particular species of aliens that we discovered. They're all completely different. This won't mean much if you've not played the game, but what really helped me this time was the Space Prawns. They seemed to offer huge amounts of points compared to the other aliens, and my early "traces" gave me a huge advantage from them.
So the variation in different games of SETI will be huge - but don't worry, even if you're playing Ed, a combo of aliens can still derail it for him. And unlike Terraforming Mars - another "Ed" game that this one shared some common elements with - a lot of the cards you get in this one are random draws from the deck, so you can still be screwed by crap cards.
There were some murmurs about downtime between turns, but I guess I'll have to play it a few more times to comment on that. We had a lot of downtime in our game, not helped by all the tutoring going on, or indeed by a mysterious outbreak of being sociable; but on the next table they played through a 3-player game of Agricola and 4 of the 5 rounds of SETI in the time it took us to do rounds 3-5; so it needn't be too slow.
Anyway, after all that, I really like this game, much more than any of its comparators mentioned here (even EDS, which I also liked). I'm looking forward to trying out another random lot of aliens next time.
In other news, this was surely one of the best-attended Saturday games days we've had so far. There were as many as 9 simultaneous games going on across 4 different rooms, which is great. The only downside was that we discovered - in passing - the limit of Ousebank House's catering capacity. I ordered my breakfast at about 10:30 and got it at 12:00, and I wasn't the last. We're always urged to buy meals on games days, to support the venue, but I for one will consider having breakfast at home next time there are this many games planned. Hopefully they made a decent profit out of the day, anyway.