Buy them, and they will top up certain facilities. The sets you create will contribute a small number of points, but the lion’s share comes from the Progress Cards. There are STEM (red), Science (yellow), Earth (green) and Exploration (Blue) categories, with two facilities in each, and they need upwards of eight points to be fully constructed. The ultimate aim of To the Moon and Beyond is to build all eight of the facilities on the ISS. These points are what determine victory or failure. When you reach a turn end, if you have four cards of the same colour, or you collect all four colours, then you can cash them in as ‘sets’, which generates you points that can be spent on building aspects of the ISS. They also come tagged with four different colours (blue, red, green and yellow). The simplest is by offering you more NASA coins in the next turn, investing in your future. Progress Cards contribute progress in a few different ways. Like Research Cards, they cost an amount of NASA coins, and – as mentioned – Research Cards can discount their price dramatically (often down to a single coin). The Progress Cards are what win you games. Research cards are basically Progress Card enablers. But, once you have them socketed into one of ten different slots on the station, they act as a discount on the Progress Cards you wish to purchase (as long as the Progress Card has the corresponding image), or they unlock the ability to play certain locked Progress Cards. So, they’re delayed in their gratification, and there’s absolutely no point in placing them on the last turn. ![]() Once bought, they don’t trigger immediately: they have to be plonked onto a space shuttle to arrive on the space station the following year/turn. Research Cards have a very singular, simple function, so they’re the easiest to describe. As a game, it’s also a bit complicated and knotty for younger generations, so the opportunity to teach an under-10 also gets jettisoned out of the airlock.īut shoo away the feelings that To the Moon and Beyond’s raison d’etre is faulty, and there’s a wonky but fun card game here. But considering this is a collaboration with NASA and clearly a lot of effort has been invested into it, we struggled to see what was being taught, and we carried away very little. ![]() ![]() If we’re being charitable, it reinforced the notion that the ISS is a place of research without borders. It’s perhaps the most surprising failing of To the Moon and Beyond: we came away none-the-wiser about what it’s like to work on the International Space Station. But there is no thrill to that experiment: they are always successful (give or take some event cards), you don’t see the results of them, and they’re represented on cards where the experimentation topic gets lost in game information, like the card’s cost, the resources it generates, and what research it relates to. To the Moon and Beyond clearly wants to inspire you with feelings of pitching experiments on Earth, before launching them into space to be researched in zero gravity. Or, at least, it’s a theme that has no drama to it. It’s a noble theme, but one that doesn’t really work.
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