Lost in Space Reviews

[i] My Experience [/i] I liked the theme of [b]Lost in Space: Madness[/b] and tend to enjoy card games, so I picked this one up to play with some friends. We only had three players, so we all decided together what our fourth should do (the Somnium ship always has four crew members). We attempted two runs of the game, and then I tried a run solo. The first run entirely consisted of us trying to figure out the rules, even after we did the tutorial. When does our turn technically start? It seems that players can begin acting once the movement prompt is on the right side of the screen. How do we use debugging? You toggle it on and click on the dice symbols that appear near where you originally clicked to roll. How many times can you roll? Perhaps this is obvious, but you can actually roll twice per character. We assumed initially that we'd only get one roll per character, since this is the norm in so many board games. However, there is a number that represents how many rolls your character has once you zoom in on a ship compartment (so perhaps this was on us). How do we get extra beneficial cards? It seems that you earn a new card after rolling three of the "helping hand" symbol across your dice rolls. I think that these cards are earned "per character," rather than being able to combine helping hand symbols across multiple character's rolls. This experience was about as exhausting as it sounds. We lost our first game fairly quickly, as there was no way we could keep up with repairing the various ship compartments while only rolling once per character per turn (you repair by rolling the "crossed wrench" symbols). It also took us a while to learn that we could spend skill points to use the abilities of the compartments. It would be great if mousing over the compartments showed the ability that could be activated there. Each compartment has a symbol to represent its ability, but it still felt as though some memorization was called for. The "Engine Separation" compartment might've helped us stay alive a bit longer, as it allows you to repair the overall health of the ship. We lost our second game after running into a game bug. We'd used a card to resurrect a dead teammate, and the game just kept rotating between giving priority to the character that used the revive card and the resurrected teammate. We'd click to end the turn of one and it would act like it was the turn of the other, then we'd end the turn of that character and it would rotate back to the first. We decided to stop playing together at that point. After a few days, I hopped in to try and play the game single-player. I [i]still[/i] learned new things! At least in single-player, your crew can take their turns in any order. This makes a tremendous difference, as you can coordinate better for crew members to use skills that apply to all characters in the same room, or for the skill that allows all characters to move through damaged compartments without losing health. I also learned (and would encourage potential players) to prioritize keeping the "mind" stat of all crew members as high as possible. High mind allows you to survive the "madness" card draws, which can quickly spoil a run. Although losing all of your health kills your character (while losing your mind doesn't seem to), it's much easier to regain health points than mind points. To be honest, I ended up quitting this third run before finishing. I felt that I had a [i]good enough[/i] idea of what the game was doing, and the run just seemed interminable. I felt I'd been playing quite a while, but then saw that the Somnium (my ship) was only halfway to its destination. While I do think that there could be a good game here, at this point the game seems to need a few more bug fixes, a bit more UI clarity, and a much, much better tutorial. Lastly, for some reason the game has picked up a "roguelike deckbuilder" tag. Although you could say that it is card-based (especially the negative madness and ship damage card draws), it's not a deckbuilder of any type.

The game looks great and the sound track is solid. I like the mechanics of the game but the UI is confusing and unnecessarily complex. Each turn, something bad happens to the ship then you move your crew around to solve problems and repair the ship. I would love to hear some voice acting and for the translation to be localized better. Worth keeping an eye on if you are into sci fi and board games, but I would wait for a few updates before you buy it. https://youtu.be/bOE0EmO1ZAU