Designer: Tory Neimann

You lead a corporation colonizing a new planet. To do so, you’ll need to mine the nearby asteroid belt, gather some solar rays from the nearby satellite array and occasionally crash a spaceship into the planet and tell its inhabitants to suck it up, plant your flag and start farming potatoes.

Interesting Mechanic: Aggressive Dice Placement. Alien Frontiers is a dice placement game, similar to Kingsburg, which is coming. =) However, this game varies  in a couple of ways. The first is that it looks more at patterns of dice – straights, or three-of-a-kinds for examples, which makes more dice viable on a given turn. But the second is more aggressive. There are only about 8 locations to place your dice, but multiple people can place their dice there. However, there are a limited number of slots, and the dice rolls may block your opponents — you can only mine if the die you are placing is equal to or higher than all other dice already placed.

This core mechanic makes for a quick-moving resource management game that still has a lot of player interaction, which is to say, don’t hoard your resources, or they won’t be yours for very long.

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(Photo Credit: Pixel Vallee)