S1E4 - Stellar Horizons (Space Exploration)

#SpaceExploration #StellarHorizons #Space #CompassGames 

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This month we head to the final frontier, with Stellar Horizons from Compass Games. We also have our very first guest host, Christoph Wagner from Kennedy Space Center. We talk about near-future space exploration, colonization, asteroids, launch failures, space pirates, and more.

Timestamps

00:44 - Meet Christoph Wagner
03:19 - Science facts - Rusty Mars and poisonous oxygen
05:26 - Stellar Horizons game overview & mechanics
15:25 - Science overview
17:01 - Reusable rockets
18:47 - Space politics and game factions
23:50 - Astronomy in the game
26:00 - Space combat and space pirates!
29:25 - Getting to Mars & the Lagrange points
32:26 - Game tweaks wish list
39:41 - Final grades

Game Results

 - Game 1: Earth destroyed by asteroid
 - Game 2: China and Russia save Earth from asteroid!

Links

• Stellar Horizons official website (Note: Rules PDF *is* downloadable from here)
• Kennedy Space Center
• The Great Oxygenation Event

Full Transcript

Brian  0:06  
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talked about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason  0:11  
Today, we'll be talking about Stellar Horizons by compass games.

All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason.

Brian  0:22  
This is Brian.

Christoph  0:23  
This is Christoph

Jason  0:24  
So yes, we have our very first special guest host here. Christopher Wagner. Wagner or Wagner?

Christoph  0:29  
Wagner is the German way to say it and Wagner here in the States, that's fine. 

Jason  0:33  
For those of you who know the game, this is a game about near Earth space exploration. Brian and I are plant biologists we have no expertise here. So we wanted to get someone on who actually knew what they were talking about. So Christoph, tell us about yourself.

Christoph  0:44  
Sure. So I am I have a degree in physics and master's degree in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. I'm originally come from Germany and did my mechanical engineering in physics in Germany, and then studied aerospace engineering at Purdue University with a major in astrodynamics control and guidance, navigation and control theory. Unfortunately, after I got done with that degree, I could not get a job in that field here in the US because of my German citizenship. And most of those jobs do require a higher levels of security clearances. And so I ended up working Caterpillar for 10 years,

Jason  1:19  
not involved in space exploration

Christoph  1:21  
not involved in space at all, unfortunately, but then through some, I got let go from Caterpillar in 2016 ended up in a company, a hydraulics company up in Minnesota, but that got way cold for me. So I only lasted two years. And I took a job at Walt Disney Imagineering down here in Orlando. So I designed or I was part of the ride team that designed the Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind roller coaster at Epcot Center. 

Brian  1:49  
I just rode that. That's so much fun. 

Christoph  1:51  
Yes, yes, it is a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun designing it too. But I was only a contractor. So when COVID hit, they let me go. And I was unemployed for a few months, and obviously started looking and I found this job that was essentially almost tailored for me at Kennedy Space Center, which is fluid design engineer. So I applied it took a while but in October 2020, I started my position as a fluid design engineer at Kennedy Space Center, I worked for a contractor for NASA contractor called Jacobs. And my main responsibility these days is that I'm the lead contract engineer for the hydraulic systems on the mobile launch tower ordinance. 

Brian  2:33  
That's very cool. 

Christoph  2:34  
 It's very cool to say that I am actually part of the Artemis team. And I have my little pin to prove it right here. 

Brian  2:43  
That's awesome. 

Christoph  2:43  
So yeah, so my biggest dream was always working in the space related field. And it took a while. But now I'm finally here. And I've been I'm having a good time.

Brian  2:52  
It sounds like you are super overqualified to talk about this game.

Christoph  2:59  
Well, I'll try not to use any fancy language here. Because the game does the same thing. I thought they did a fantastic job with how they tried to relate progression and space development and space engineering to somebody who you know, like you guys have nothing to do with space. So I thought they did a wonderful job and I'll try and keep it at the same level. 

Jason  3:19  
All right,sounds good. So before we dive into the game, I always like doing this fun science fact first and Christophe as our guest, you get first priority. Have you picked up any fun science facts lately?

Christoph  3:29  
Well, one fight since we're talking about space, do you guys know why the white Mars is red? 

Brian  3:35  
Iron oxide?

Jason  3:36  
Yeah, rust iron oxide in the regolith.

Christoph  3:39  
That's My mind science. Fun fact. Most people don't know that it's a rusty planet.

Brian  3:44  
So where did all the oxygen come from that rusted out all the iron?

Christoph  3:47  
Yee, good question. I'm not a geologist. That is, I mean, most of these planets, you know, they were formed many many many, many billion years ago from solar dust. I'm, I'm just gonna say I don't know.

Jason  4:00  
Yet right? We have to respect the specialties of the people. He's a fluid engineer. And there are currently no fluids on Mars. So that's all right little area. 

Christoph  4:09  
As far as we know. We haven't found any. We have some found some evidence, but we have not found any actual water or fluids yet. 

Brian  4:15  
Well, I found a science fact too but now I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about how photosynthesis almost destroyed the world. 

Jason  4:22  
 Photosynthesis was three episodes ago, Brian. 

Brian  4:26  
No, no, no, no, not the game, not the game, the chemical process. So when photosynthesis developed there was not a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere. And as oxygen was poisonous to the majority of life and basically started to slowly build up and actually you can see there's these layers in the geological record of rusted out iron that happens periodically. And as oxygen builds up in the atmosphere, it caused climate change that plunged the entire planet into like a giant snowball almost presumably killed all life on Earth. But when eventually it came out the other side now we have complex eukaryotic life. So something about the process like yes, photosynthesis almost destroyed life on the planet and completely rewired the ecosystem.

Jason  5:08  
I'm trying to come up with a witty response to that and I'm having trouble. I don't think we're gonna be quite so lucky if we almost destroy the planet this way. But But yes, I've heard of the great oxygenation event and all the the iron bands and everything.

Brian  5:21  
 My other thing was going to be the methane plumes on Mars, but I think we're good. Okay.

Jason  5:26  
All right. Well, let's go into this game. So Stellar Horizons by compass games, designed by Andrew Rader, who is also overqualified to design this game, so I looked him up. He has his PhD from MIT in like human space exploration. He works for SpaceX. He's published multiple children's books about space exploration. So this guy definitely has it down. The game itself, It's for one for  one to seven players ages 14 up which I will say that's probably accurate. This is a very complicated game. Play time. Some of the scenarios claimed to be able to be played in 30 minutes, I have my doubts. The full campaign for experienced players is supposed to last eight or more hours, this is a game this is not a let's break it out during party time. This is something that you devote at least half of your Saturday to sometimes even the whole weekend, depending on if you've got the full seven players spread going. As far as the game itself, it's very high quality. There's all sorts of pieces in there, there is so much game in this game, there is been a 11 pound box with about 5 billion little components inside it, which is only a little bit of an exaggeration. I actually looked at the parts list. And slight aside, this is the only parts list for a game I've ever seen that included the box as one of the components. So it's very thorough, and there are just over 1700 individual components to this game.

Can I ask did you time yourself when you were popping out all the tokens and how long it actually took? 

I did not because I was just doing it while watching my wife play video games. So it was just kind of taking advantage of other side it took a while there were literally like 25 sheets of chipboard now they're high quality chipboard, very good game components. When I bought this, I said it was the most expensive and heaviest board game I've ever bought was like $130 at my local game store. Like I said 11 pounds. Most of those bits are resources or other bookkeeping things. So like you got your fuel your money, your ore you've got little faction markers to mark things up. So a lot of it is just bookkeeping stuff, which is just incidental to the game. The real core of the game is you have your planet tiles, which there's a dozen of those. So there's the eight planets. There's also the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, even Alpha Centauri, there's 24 satellites slash Moon Slash dwarf planets, there's seven different factions. Each of them has their board and about 30 individual units they have, they're all slightly different from each other. There's a big tech tree board, there's a policy board, there's player aids, there are mini rule books for each player to reference during the time there is a lot of game in this game. There's a lot of components, there's a lot of moving parts. The impression I got while reading is that it has the potential of being a very deep game. Like if you really sink the time into understand this well, there's all sorts of different strategies and ways you can play it and such there's a lot going on, but is a lot It is not for the faint of heart to get in. It is a very complicated game. Christoph, you said you looked over the rules you didn't have a chance to play, what were your thoughts on that

it is a very, very complex game. And I also felt that you can make it as complex as you want to, you can simplify it if you want to. There's options there. I think I felt that just the base mechanics are not that hard. But the problem is you can put layers and layers and layers on top of that, that can make the game extremely complicated. And for people that like that, it's you know, like me, it was really well designed. I have to say the way he did that, but yes, you do need I don't even know if you can get a an average teenager to play this game. Because it is it does take some thought and patience and time to get into it.

Brian  8:54  
We were talking about that and trying to figure out like who is this game for specifically, and it seems to be just in terms of space, you need an enormous table to lay out to play the whole campaign. You need to leave it there all day. I think there's a tradition of people playing Risk where they will show up in the morning and they will play all day long. This is that game this is I can dedicate a huge amount of space and time and have a group of friends that will that will play this ridiculous game with me over the entirety of the campaign. That's monopoly for with densely more complication.

Jason  9:25  
Yeah so the the genre this falls into it's a 4X Strategy game or the 4X is our explore, expand, exploit and exterminate where basically you are exploring things you are expanding your territory, you are extracting resources, exploiting resources, and you are exterminated or combating other factions to try to take over this is more famous in computer games. Civilization is probably the quintessential 4X game. There are some board games Twilight Imperium is probably the most famous board game in this area. And so there's definitely people who really liked this Twilight Imperium is somewhere in the top 50 Maybe the top 30 of Board Game Geek so there's definitely a strong and following for it, it's not necessarily what Brian and I tend to play a lot. But there's definitely a big market out there for and it's, as far as I can tell, this is a well designed one speaking as someone who's not super experienced in this area, but it seems very well put together for that. As far as how playing the game works, you lay out the planets and all the satellites and everything, you lay out your faction board and your tech tree and things like that. And then there's different scenarios you can go through. So the default campaign is you basically start in 2030, and you play 150 years, which is literally 150 turns of near future space exploration, exploring worlds and launching probes and developing new technologies, and eventually moving on to colonizing outer space and mining it and possibly fighting wars in it. And the end goal is that after that in 2170, I think is when it ends, then you end and you count up all your victory points, and whoever has the most victory points wins. There's also a bunch of other scenarios out there. So Brian and I played a much shorter scenario where there's an asteroid headed to Earth and you have 20 years to try to deflect it or shoot it to bits or whatever. So the Earth does not get blown up. We played really poorly the first time and so we just stopped halfway through because we knew the Earth was just gonna get obliterated. So we started over again, and did much better the second time because we realized we could not explore the asteroid to death, it was not going to work. We just took guns up there and blew it apart and then towed it with some other stuff. And it worked much better at that time.

Brian  11:22  
We also realized that some of the resources that we were dependent on and say, Well, wait a second, look more carefully. You can only make fuel on Earth. If you're not able to shuttle or make it where you're going like it was we didn't understand the game that first time like in terms of that explore part we were we were not exploiting correctly. 

Jason  11:37  
Yeah. And part of this is just there's a lot of rules to keep track of I kept wishing I had a computer to keep track of all the little bookkeeping, things like how much money I have, which level of the tech tree I'm at. So do my robots fail at a 27% rate? Or at a 24% rate? How often do my engines fail? These little things that are built in there? I mean, this is really, Brian, you like talking about the metaphor of the game? This game has no metaphor. It's a simulation game, you are playing a game about exploring space, and you do it by exploring space. Like that's it. Like there's no metaphor here at all.

Brian  12:10  
Yeah, blue, the entire Russian space budget of $40 billion in two turns. 

Jason  12:15  
Yes, there's that you only get money every 10 turns. So it does mean that you're kind of strapped by the end of it. So but it does include all the little bits of space exploration like your engines can fail, your robots can just blow up at some point when you try to use them. If you have a crewed vehicle, there's a 50% chance they're gonna have to come back every time you use them because something went wrong. Now what I like is that every time something like that goes wrong, you actually get tech points representing that you're learning from your mistakes, like, Oh, our robot blew up. Well, now we know how to build better robots. So I get some tech points toward my next technology, or oh, we had to get our crew back. Because who knows what happened? It's like, well, now I get some biology points. Because now we know better how to keep people alive in space. Like I liked that. That was a it's a nice consolation for things always blowing up, I did a little bit of solo play, to try to figure out the rules. And the poor European Union could not get a satellite into space for the life of them. I rolled so many engine failures for those poor people. Like every single satellite, they took spent 10s of billions of dollars on these telescopes and probes and stuff. And they just blew up on the launchpad one after another after another.

Brian  13:18  
I was so sad when the one ship I had just blew up, blew up. Yeah. 

Christoph  13:22  
And you know, that's very realistic, right there. I mean, if you look at the development of the APOLLO PRO of the Apollo program, you know, going from Germany and joining with Gemini program and how many rockets, they blew up before they were able to launch it successfully for the first time. You know, if you look in any more younger history, we look SpaceX and Blue Origin. Those guys keep blowing up stuff. You may not always hear it in the news, but I mean, it took it took a while for them to have their first successful flight. And while in flight, for now, it's SpaceX. I think it hasn't has a pretty stellar record. So they have to see what happens to Blue Origin. I mean, they have they've had one failure with a human flight right, but they got the humans back to Earth no problem. I thought that that whole scenario and how they do how that was integrated into the game was really well done. The presented I mean, they they worked with percentages on how likely it is for your engine yet and you have to go for it. I tried to look into those percentages if that it's really hard to put a realistic number on that. If you look at human spaceflight, you know, if you look at the Apollo program, and there's only during the entire Apollo program, there was only one one set of astronauts that died Grissom Chaffin White with Apollo I, but they only had not that many missions. So overall, I still think it was a massively successful program, obviously.

Yep. I think the percentage for failure is about 5% On launch and slightly lower if you you're launching a crewed vehicle because presumably we take more care when there's people involved would probably would actually about fit with Apollo, to be honest, right? 

That you know, it also depends on the launch vehicle that kind of launch vehicle the Soyuz is incredibly reliable, that launch that failure percentage just have to be really, really, really low probably even below 5%. But they had to come, they had to put some number on it. And my feeling is that they just looked at a few different programs of failure of the rockets and came up with the used a big thumb. And well, this looks good. And let's go down this way,

Jason  15:17  
and probably balance it with, we don't want to make this so high that it becomes unfun.

Christoph  15:21  
right, because that's still the most important part of the game and has to be fun to play.

Jason  15:25  
Yep, so let's move on to some science stuff. So I was looking through this. And there's obviously a lot of science potentially in here. So space exploration, vehicle design, near Earth astronomy, there is an actual deep space astronomy, you can explore but only with telescopes doesn't come in hugely. Most of it is within the solar system, engineering, orbital mechanics. So they actually, there's different transit times to go from one planet to another to another that are roughly on par with how far they are apart in the solar system, running a space program, a little bit of the economics of it, it is funny that the unit of currency is billions, you cannot have less than a billion dollars and nothing cost less than a billion dollars. So yeah, so you've already talked about this a little bit, Christoph. But how does this reflect as someone who's in the space program, and probably one of the premier space programs on the planet right now? How does this feel to you? Does it feel like an accurate representation? 

Christoph  16:16  
Well, it's, I would say, it's very idealized. I mean, in real reality, any spacecraft program, you look like they run over budget, so you can put a budget on it? You know, I don't I don't think I saw anything where we have that mechanic in there where you overrun the budget, you always meet it, or you have to go under it, right? 

Brian  16:35  
I think they do. You can overrun your support limit, you can have more vehicles out there, then you can pay for and then you don't get all of your budget, you have to use some to support your ships. I don't know if that's exactly the same as what you mean. But yeah, you can be in debt based on the number of vehicles you have out there.

Jason  16:52  
But only if they're you're there when the decade turns so you could have them up till year nine. Oh, and then you just scrap them all. And you don't have to pay for them come year 10. 

Christoph  17:01  
Yeah, For non reusable rockets, that may be true. But these days, everything is going to reusable rockets. Right. So you have a maintenance fee maintenance cost. If you look at SpaceX, they have a whole science now devoted to looking at how to refurbish the rockets, the most optimal, most quickest and most cheapest way. And it's it's very, very interesting to see all that back in the day. They didn't even think of that stuff.

Jason  17:29  
Yeah. Which is actually an interesting part. So the part of the game is they have this big tech tree of all the near future technologies you can develop. And some of them are way out there like antimatter reactors and fusion drives. But some of the early ones are some of them we already have one of the very first ones is reusable launch vehicles, which I think only the United States starts off with it technically is North America, the United States and Canada, but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be just the US. Anyway, North America starts off with reusable launch rockets and the full campaign I don't think anyone else does. And the game implies that's one of the first ones most people are going to go for so that you stop just burning money every time you get something into space. One thing I'm curious about those launch rockets have a 75% chance of recovery, but a 25% chance of failure is that about on par with what we see with real reusable launch rockets.

Christoph  18:17  
I would have to dig a little deeper into this. But my first instinct is absolutely not. They will be there. SpaceX has recovered all their rockets so far, as far as I can tell.

Jason  18:26  
OK, so they don't blow up on the launchpad, they actually get up into space. And we have a very good ability to get them back. 

Christoph  18:31  
Right, it lands, right, some of them land way out on the ocean on a re designed oil platform. And then the sometimes even land back at Kennedy Space Center. So you can see them come back. Yeah, but 25% Failure seems awfully high. 

Jason  18:47  
OK, So that may be one of the game mechanics they put in and just so you don't get free launch vehicles from then on out, right. So probably to even up because I mean, looking at the full campaign, you should not start the full campaign and then just play 20 or 30 years because North America has a huge advantage to start with the other factions are usually in there for the long game like that. That's why most of the other scenarios, they start with a more even tech tree, but I think the campaign is meant to simulate roughly where we're going to be in about 10 years with some some exceptions. So actually, it's probably good time to talk about the factions. And you'd probably know a lot better how the various space programs around the world are. So there's seven factions. There's North America, which is the US and Canada. There's the European Union, there's China, Russia, Japan, Asia, which is sort of India, Pakistan, and a few other of the Middle East, Southern Asian countries. And then South America and Africa, which is essentially just the entire global south glommed together. And I was doing some research on this. I know some of these places have space programs currently U.S.,  Russia and China being the most advanced that I'm aware of Europe has a bunch of satellite work, JAXA, in Japan. How big are these players in the global scheme of things?

Christoph  19:56  
Well, right now obviously the biggest player's NASA there's nothing Bigger than that right now, some people like to use like using old word words again, like space race with Russia and China, because you can see that there seems to be some I don't think it's been really confirmed yet but that China and Russia are working together now on the space program and launching rockets. One thing you have to make clear these days, no country can do a run space program all on its own anymore. Just not possible not feasible. If you look at the NASA and you know, I can look at our Artemis program, there's the Artemis Accords, where I once I want to see there's like 60 or 70 countries that signed on to it. And so they're all working together to land people back on the moon.

Jason  20:41  
So what drives that? Is it? Is it the technologies like you just need different aspects of technology? Is it the price like no one nation can actually afford this level of engineering? What is it that drives that level of collaboration.

Christoph  20:53  
Technology and sharing technology is definitely a small part of it. But big part is the cost. You want to share the cost of planning the first man on world not the first but the first man after Apollo back on the moon, the economy involved is unbelievable. No country would would want to carry all that burden on its own anymore these days. So So you have these days, you have the obviously, as I just mentioned, China and Russia that seem to be working together, obviously, it's really hard to tell right now. But then on on the western civilization side, you have, you know, China, JAXA, NASA, ISA that are working together, India is coming up really fast. They just landed the first probe on the moon not too long ago, that was also a story where they had, you know, four or five failures. And finally, it worked out. So that's the next. I think the next biggest player on the field, South America, you don't really hear too much about them. And I'm not sure they but they I'm sure. We obviously have Latin American engineers that work at NASA. So while I was looking, thinking about this game, it's I realized something is somehow the people that originally were all involved in astronomy, the Egyptians, the Mexican that makes it of the Aztec culture. None of those are really spacefaring anymore. They started it somehow looking up into the stars, but these days have very little influence on what's going on anymore. Hopefully, that will change. I'd love to see it change. I know that Mexico has its own space agency. See, for example, 

Jason  22:25  
Yeah, oddly, Mexico does not belong to any of the factions. So if you look at the launch trailer for the game, there's one spot where they show the world and they outline countries, according to the faction and Mexico just got left out in the cold, unfortunately, 

Brian  22:38  
It didn't even get included in North America for some reason.

Jason  22:41  
Yeah. The global south when it based on the flag, it looks like it's basically Brazil and friends. And I did look, Brazil has some sort of space agency, they obviously don't have their own launch capacity. But I think they do have they do put up some satellites,

Christoph  22:52  
they have launched satellites in the past.

Jason  22:54  
OK, That's about the extent I know of that

Brian  22:56  
When we when Jason and I played our scenario, we worked as China and Russia, we worked together.

Jason  23:01  
The time we won, we worked as China and Russia because I realized that Chinese ships in the game had more weaponry than the global south ships that I was trying the first time around. There's only one ship of the global south that actually has armaments to shoot an asteroid, unfortunately, and China had two or three, so I switched to them instead, I didn't check part of me suspect that the North American may have the most guns of them all. But maybe that's just my own impression of how our country works.

Christoph  23:26  
Now, let me let me make one more comment here. If us space cadets that all work at the these various space agencies around the world had our choice, we would get politics out of the way completely just all work together.

Jason  23:38  
I imagine I met most of the people in the rank and file probably care more about the science and the the goal of getting there then which country gets credit and who's jockeying with whom. Absolutely. Okay, so let's get into the Astronomy Part of this now. So there's a lot of not just engineering, but also the astronomy, there's all these different world cards, the planets of the entire solar system, and there's actually some nice science facts on them. So if you start if you look on the fine print on each of the cards, it tells you its gravity rating, it'll tell you if it's a rocky or icy planet, a gas giant, it may have its astronomical distance from the sun. If not, I know the player inserts actually have a to scale showing of here's all the planets and the thing and they actually have a little scale bar underneath. So they show you how much how far apart things are. I am not a I don't even know what the word for it is an extra planetary geologist. What does that EXO geologist is, you know, geologist,

Christoph  24:31  
yeah, planetary geologist, 

Jason  24:33  
planetary geologist, not a planetary geologist. I don't know how accurate these are other than they look kind of like what I understand. What's your thought about the game? So they have these different little bits of pieces. How, how accurate are they? Are they simplified? I'm trying to go I don't know how to phrase this question. 

Christoph  24:49  
Yeah, I looked into it a little bit. And obviously, I'm an engineer not a geologist either, but from the little  I could tell, It's obviously it's very simplified at To make it accessible to everybody, they also had to make some guesses, you know, because some of this was you have to have resources on certain planets to, that you need to be able to get to for your, if you want to build a base and things like that. So I have a feeling they had to take some liberties here. But they can actually mined and get from the planet. But a few years ago, we had that it's also a great book, where they settled for the sent a human to Mars. I can't remember who was in it. The Martian, The Martian? Yes, yes, exactly. If you read that book and look at it and watch the movie, it is really well very accurately done. There's some minor mistakes, I'm not gonna go there right now. But you can just see what kind of effort it is to put somebody on Mars and make it habitable. So you need resources that the planet has to offer. So as I said, it looks like they may have taken some liberties there, just my broad sense.

Brian  25:54  
So maybe there is a little bit of metaphor here. It's not a full simulation. It did. There are approximations.

Christoph  26:00  
Yeah. I mean, ya know, you we haven't talked about it, but that you have space combat, I hope there's never going to be space combat,

Jason  26:08  
yet, but they put it in there is an altarnate rule where you can actually take that out of the game, where you you remove the combat, you live in the utopia rule set, I think it was, but I do like with space combat, the very first step of combat is you have to search for who you're trying to shoot, like space is big, and you may not find them. So you actually have to roll to see if you can even find who you're trying to engage with. And then if you do, then you get to do this whole system of tactics, points. And do you shoot from a distance? Or do we get close enough to actually shoot directly? Bases are easier to find. I was a little worried when I saw Oh, if you do this thing, this is orbital bombardment. It's like, I really don't want that to be a real thing. But I can understand why they put it in the game.

Christoph  26:48  
Yeah space combat is fun right, but only in fantasy. 

Jason  26:52  
Yeah, I do wonder about it, though, because there's some pretty harsh limits in terms of how many ships you can support at once. Most factions start by being able to support three at most, usually, only two crewed vehicles. And even if you invest all your politics points into it, you only get like two or three more than that. And so we're talking fleets that consist of like five ships trying to attack each other across the solar system. So again, we never got to this point in the campaign, we didn't have the eight to 12 hours to get that far into it. I just wonder how that would work in practice? Or if it's basically like, well, I'm claiming Jupiter, and you're claiming Saturn, and we're just going to let each other do our thing, because it's not worth wasting chips on this.

Christoph  27:31  
Yeah, I mean, if you just look at what's happening now on Earth, if you're SpaceX has like four or five rockets that they can launch that are refurbished will you know, and then if he add Blue Origin to it, I would probably say there's a good dozen reusable rockets out there right now that can be used and launched on a regular basis. So five is a very small number. 

Jason  27:52  
Yeah, I think the five limit is more for the crewed vehicles. So that would be theoretical manned missions going somewhere,

Christoph  27:58  
even for manned. You know, right now. The Falcon Heavy, I think there's like two or three of them out there. There'll be more in again, if you want new Glenn is ready to launch, you know, they'll double that capacity at least. Okay.

Brian  28:11  
What about space pirates? Are we? gonna have space pirates? 

Jason  28:16  
Yes, there's a part of the game that after a certain point of development, Space Pirates just spontaneously appear on the board. 

Brian  28:22  
They just spawn into existence

Jason  28:24  
Yes, they just appear, like no one creates them, they just start happening. They're like rats, or yeast or mold or something. They just kind of come out of the woodwork or the space work as your economy gets sufficiently developed. 

Christoph  28:36  
Who knows? I mean, it I guess you can pose the question, is that a natural progression of we saw that happen here on Earth? And why would it happen in space as well that you'll get some Freebooters out there that got start invading other ships?

Brian  28:53  
Because if you if the economics of it makes sense, then it Yeah, we will happen?

Christoph  28:57  
Yeah, I'm not sure if there's one faction that will be able to finance that. But you know, there's other Elon Musk's out there that have a boatload of money hidden away somewhere. Why not?

Jason  29:08  
They're probably spin off from the various bases. You're supposed to be building this disgruntled employees and such as like, I'm tired of working for the EU or for China or whatever. I'm just gonna go off on my own and become a pirate. Sounds like a legitimate career move.

Brian  29:21  
We'll have a black market, sugar beet wine.

Jason  29:25  
Now what about near future? So one thing, there's another technology that only North America I think starts with in the campaign is the ability to get ships to Mars, like manned crewed vehicles to Mars. And I know I've heard about the efforts to get people to Mars, but I haven't heard a lot about it recently. What's the status of that right now?

Christoph  29:43  
So right now it's all the purpose of the Artemis program at the end of the Artemis program is landing the first man on on Mars, but getting there you know, they they claim they can do it in the 2030s not sure if that's going to happen because there's a lot of things that have to be engineered. and designed first. So the plan right now is to get to the moon first start building a base on the moon, and especially in a space station that will be going around the moon called Gateway, and then they will launch to Mars from Gateway. So the plan is probably to assemble the rocket that's going to go to Mars on Gateway, and then it will launch from Gateway from orbit around the moon. 

Brian  30:22  
That's so cool. 

Christoph  30:24  
Which, by the way, one of the things I missed in this game is that these days, there's a lot of missions that go to the ligrange points. So the there's five equilibrium points in a three body system, where you can, in theory, put a mass satellite there to never move, you know, so between Sun earth, earth, moon, so on and so forth. We always have these five points. So Gateway, one of the proposals is to put it at Earth Moon L1,

Jason  30:47  
 Okay, that's the one that's in between the Earth and the Moon?

Christoph  30:50  
The between Earth and Moon, yes, L2 is on the other side of the moon. And then you have L3, which is on the other side of Earth. And then you have L4 and 5, which are an equilateral triangle between Earth and Moon. 

Jason  31:02  
And the benefit of these places, you can put something there and then he doesn't require any fuel to stay there. It just is sort of held there by the gravitational interactions of the multiple bodies.

Christoph  31:12  
Correct. So it's our, the orbit, so you can't really reach those points in a practice, but you can orbit them so that's what they do more with these points called ligrational orbits, lagrange orbits, whatever, you want to lose a few names for the there's been some successful missions. Like for example, this, the James Webb Telescope is at L2. So.

Brian  31:34  
interesting. So how would we how would we do that in Stellar Horizons, you'd have to have like places where you could send a mission or build a base, but it wouldn't be able to, like generate resources the way other things can in Stellar Horizons, because there's nothing there. It's just a stable. 

Christoph  31:47  
Yeah, you Jupiter's space station that would be supplied by whatever moon or planet you're, it's, it's orbiting. 

Jason  31:55  
probably the abstractions that anytime something is in orbit around a planet, you could just hand wave that say it's actually at one of the Lagrange points, the game has enough bookkeeping, I don't want to keep track of multiple stable orbit locations, in addition to all the planets and moons and everything else. 

Christoph  32:10  
Yeah. And by the way, it doesn't mean that you need no fuel to stay around Lagrange points, because L1, L2, L3 are considered unstable. So you do need some station keeping fuel on board.

Jason  32:21  
Okay, got it. So you need to like minor adjustments, basically, just to kind of nudge it back and forth. 

Christoph  32:25  
Minor adjustments, Yes. 

Jason  32:26  
Okay. All right. So kind of getting down to the end of the game discussion. If you could change something about this game that you think like, would you are there things that you think we could make this maybe a bit more accurate? Or maybe things that they tried too hard on? Like, what would you try to adjust to the game to make it fit your vision of space exploration better?

Christoph  32:44  
Oh, good point. Good question. You know, I'm a little bit of an idealist, I will probably try it and take some of the politics little out of it and not be so heavily on diplomacy and, and have the countries work together better, but you have to roll for it. So that kind of that bothered me a little bit. And then it just you still have to roll for engine failures and stuff like that. So you have a probability effect there that, yes, you have it in real life, too. But it's not a it's not a gamble if a rocket explodes in that it explodes because there are failures in the system. It'd be better to maybe add a mechanic that there is, you know, some people saw something on during assembly went wrong or something like that. 

Jason  33:28  
Yeah, that sounds like one of those abstractions. I do know some of the technology can reduce your failure rate, some that may represent superior engineering capacity.

Christoph  33:36  
That sort of bugged me a little bit, but I know the way they did I think it's still fine. It's still, you know, it's not game ruining or anything. It's I think this I'm eager to played with my group here. And still think it's should be a fantastic game to play for Space Cadets like me.

Jason  33:51  
And imagine part of that is that you're an engineer. And so you don't want your hard won engineering to just blow up due to a bad dice rolls that that kind of a fair assessment, right?

Brian  33:59  
Yes. Or to have the politics get in the way of what you're trying to do.

Christoph  34:02  
That explosion was preceded by 1000s of 1000s of people dedicating a lot of time, effort and love into designing this engine, and then having this random effect, there, I don't like it maybe just because I am an engineer. But yeah,

Brian  34:18  
I suppose if you just decide we don't want to do that. You just don't do it. Right. That's the joy of a board game. If you don't like a rule, don't use it.

Christoph  34:25  
You know, that's what I said in the beginning. This game has lots of lots of levels. And I think you can add and delete levels any any way you want to. I feel it's pretty flexible. Um, so.

Jason  34:34  
What were your thoughts, Brian, so we played this, we did a three hour play session, which is longer than normal. We basically got the world creamed by an asteroid the first time but then saved it the second time, we got to know the rules. 

Brian  34:46  
We went back in time we did that never happened. We Gosh, what do I think? I think that the I've never played a game where you're rolling that percentile dice so many times and so often does it not matter. So I do agree that those very low percentage events like do take a lot Like efforts to maintain this seems like the kind of game where if you're willing to dedicate the time and really learn it, it probably would be a lot of fun. But that that eight hour play time, that's hard. That's a hard commit. I used to play tabletop war games. This is this is one of those. This is spend two hours setting up and six hours playing. 

Jason  35:17  
Yeah, my feeling I kept getting while playing is "I wish I had a computer to handle all the bookkeeping", because there's really two kinds of rolls and stuff you're doing. There's the bookkeeping ones, like, Okay, how much money do I get this turn? What percentile do I need to roll under? Oh, I'm moving this ship from here. How long does that take with my current technology, etc. I really wish I had a computer to handle all of that little niggling detail so that I could focus on the important things of which planet do I want to explore? This probe is going to get there next turn, but I can explore it a penalty this turn, do I want to risk losing it and get it now? Or do I want to wait but have a less time in the future? Those decisions that I consider be the important decisions and offload to a computer all the little things? I think this would make a great computer game. So I didn't play civilization that much. But I played it see, it's sort of sci fi spin off Alpha Centauri, it reminded me a lot of that probably because there was a lot of similar technologies, some space exploration, the tech tree everything. I've heard some people when I was doing research, some people said that particular game Alpha Centauri is considered by some people to be one of the best 4X games made for computers. And so I found a lot of similarities between that and this game is I was playing it and wishing that I could offload to a computer, the same thing that I offloaded to the computer when I was playing the computer game.

Brian  36:28  
One thing I would say is that that price points for this, you said it was 120 at your friendly local game store?

Jason  36:34  
130. Although I did see at some point, compass games was running the sale at 99. But I think it's back up to 130. Now,

Brian  36:41  
so that's about two times the cost of your average designer board game. But if you think about it, in terms of time played, I mean, there are plenty of board games that have sat on my shelf that have maybe been played three or four times. If you play Stellar Horizons, the whole campaign twice, you've probably gotten more value for your money than your average designer board game for most people. Of course, you know, there are some games, you're going to bust out all the time and play a lot. But I think most of us have to admit that a lot of our games, we don't play that often. 

Jason  37:09  
Yeah, that's fair.

Christoph  37:10  
Did, there's a lot of replay value of this one, they have a bunch of scenarios that you can play and you know, you can come up with yours. I think there's, it's well worth the money.

Jason  37:20  
Yeah, those scenarios I think are a good touch. So there's the the defend from an asteroid one we played, there's the full campaign, there's one where one player is playing like a rogue AI that is basically versus all the other human players. There's one where, it's the shortest one, it's 30 minutes, it's literally, there's an alien spaceship, you have this much money, figure out how to build some ships and go blow it up before it blows you up. That's it, it's a 30 minute scenario, the only world tile is Earth, and you get a pile of money. And that's it. So like, there's a whole range of things you can do here, I do wish there was like a quickstart, like a little Quickstart for like, here's how you ease into the game and play or maybe like a YouTube how to play video, because the rules are very well laid out. And they're obviously laid out by an engineer, every rule has a number, this is 2.6.5. This is rule 3.4.7. And they're logical, they're logical in one way, but I think logically in a different way. So they're all logically all the movement rules are together, all the exploration rules are together, all the combat rules are together, which is great for looking up when you're in that phase. But I think in terms of what's doing the action, so I want all the crewed vehicle rules to be in one spot, and then all the robot vehicle rules to be in one spot. And I kept having to flip back and forth to find it, I actually made little cheat cards on the on three by five index cards to give the rules for oh, this is a crewed vehicle, it can do this and this and this and this and this. And if I were to be playing this a bunch, I would actually print those out and make them nice and neat. So I had these quick reference, because that's how I think but I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this already, I can perfectly understand why they didn't do that. From what I read online. I'm not the only person who wishes things were maybe laid out a bit differently. 

Christoph  38:51  
Yeah, I missed it. So they have the index, but there's no page numbers. Oh, 

Jason  38:56  
but they're all numbered, though. 

Christoph  38:58  
So they are numbered. So you can go through and find it. But I sometimes want to do well, but what page, you have to leave through it and find the right number. 

Brian  39:05  
This does come with a PDF version that you could search through? 

Jason  39:08  
So it's not that easy to find. But yes, you can actually download the PDFs from the Kickstarter page of all places. I don't think it's linked from the main compass games website. But the Kickstarter still has a full PDF that you can download. And I actually did that while we were playing. You may have seen I had my laptop open. I was searching for some of the rules we were trying to figure out because sometimes like okay, I read this rule somewhere, but I don't remember where and there's 10 pages of rules to go through so that that searchability was very useful there. 

Christoph  39:34  
About but Yeah I'd like to see a computer game for this one. 

Brian  39:37  
Yeah, this would make a fun app. 

Jason  39:38  
Actually, this would be a great app. I would love to see that. 

Brian  39:41  
So we've been doing these report cards for the games that we've been reviewing that review like the science how well the science is represented as well as the fun and honestly I was trying to decide if I feel qualified to grade the science in this game, but I guess I'll I'll give it my best guess. I think this is definitely a game where the science was at the front and it was trying its very best to represent the science the best that it could. And I think that it feels like it's probably an A like just for effort.

Jason  40:08  
I probably do like A-. It's not quite as at the forefront as wingspan, which is my personal bar currently for what a high science game is. There's a lot there. There's also like Christoph said some simplifications and some places where there could have been more, but there's not, there is a lot there. And so yeah, A/A- range seems good to me.

Brian  40:27  
 Our actual qualified person. What how do you grade it?

Christoph  40:30  
No, I would I would have to agree i would give it an A-does vary. And the way they simplified it, or you know, took took some edges off that now it to me, it makes total sense. You can't go into all the detail and nitty gritty in a game like this that's supposed to be for broader audience. So yeah, A- for sure.

Brian  40:49  
It's so funny hearing that this game is not detailed and complicated enough.

Jason  40:54  
No, no, that's a good thing. It's the science part of it. Next part is gameplay. I was thinking about this. And this is one where I'm split, because like I said, this is not my genre of game. So for me, I would give this like a B- just because of how complicated it is, and how much I wish I had a computer keep track of the bookkeeping. However, for someone who really likes this type of game, I imagine it would probably be more on the A-/A range, I did do some looking online. Sounds like there are some very loyal fans of it. Some of them have kind of the same quibbles about the rulebook or a combat being a little complicated. So it seems like for the people who really love this game, it falls again, in that kind of A- range. 

Brian  41:31  
I think I'm gonna give it a B just because it's I think it's probably one of those games that is fun if you put in the work. And I don't know if I can, I don't literally don't know if my life accommodates a game like this. Really, it was fun to play. I like playing the short scenario. I'm just trying to imagine the day that we would play the whole campaign. 

Jason  41:50  
Well, it's hard now that we have jobs and kids and other responsibilities like that, like if I was in college, this would be much more likely I could see just taking my friends groups like hey, we're just gonna devote this Saturday to Stellar Horizons and just make a day of it. order some pizza, take some breaks in the game. I could definitely see that happening. But in our current life situation, yeah, probably not.

Christoph  42:09  
I don't have a family here except the people that I play games with every once in a while. So but I would, I would rate it a B. It's massive. It's very complicated. It's not a not a game. I prefer games that you can pick up and set up in 15-10 minutes and start playing it. This is not that game. That's why I'm giving it a B. But fun wise, I haven't played it yet, unfortunately. But I will definitely I'm definitely looking forward to doing it with my gaming group here at some point. So that's just because of the massive just takes a long time to play is what I say I would give it a B.

Jason  42:41  
 Yeah, you said you were but you got sick. So unfortunately, that wasn't the plan, but hopefully not COVID But something 

Christoph  42:47  
Oh, no, no, not COVID Just just a little bit of a Con crud.

Brian  42:50  
Oh, did you go to a con?

Christoph  42:51  
Yeah, we I went to Megacon here in Orlando.

Brian  42:54  
Oh, is that a gamer? Con? No, it

Christoph  42:56  
is a pop culture con.

Brian  42:57  
Awesome. That's fun. I know Jason goes to Dragon Con all the time. 

Christoph  43:00  
Yeah Dragon Con is so it's just like Dragon Con but except much bigger.

Jason  43:04  
All right. Well, I think that's we're gonna wrap up again with the grades. Remember, these are just our opinions. So you are welcome to disagree, and we are welcome to be wrong about it. If you dislike it, we actually have a discord you can come in and you can tell us how wrong we are or if we got anything incorrect, but otherwise, I think we'll sign off. Christoph, thank you so much for coming. It was great having you on here. I'm glad we were able to meet. If we do any other engineering based stuff we might get back in touch.

Christoph  43:27  
Absolutely. It'd be my pleasure. It's been a lot of fun. 

Jason  43:29  
All right, so that's we're gonna wrap it so thank you everyone for listening and take care have fun happy gaming.

Brian  43:35  
Yep, have fun playing dice with the universe See Ya!.

Jason  43:44  
This has been the Gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.