Tabletop Tuesday — The Search for Planet X

A while back, my husband got me a copy of Mansions of Madness and… I played it once. It was not a good experience, in part because it requires using an app, and also in part because—like many games based on Lovecraft—it’s super hopeless, very difficult to win, and in this particular case, the app included doing a sliding-puzzle thing and the character I’d chosen for my first play-through was only allowed to do a tiny bit of work on said sliding-puzzle each turn and I just died.

While trying to do a sliding puzzle.

It had taken so long to set the game up and get through the rules, the “…and now you’re dead and all you got to do was walk into a room and try to solve a sliding puzzle” was definitely not the introduction I wanted to the game, and the thought of trying again left me utterly cold. Maybe someday.

(Also, I can’t help but wonder if the app will end up out of date or not supported and then I’ve just got a box full of junk.)

All that to say, when our friends brought over a copy of The Search for Planet X—and said we’d all want to download the app before we started playing—I had a moment of oh no.

And then I had a great time playing a logic puzzle.

Sorry, Did You Say Logic? That’s a pretty active night sky on the box, no?

Remember those logic puzzles where you had to figure out which person’s first name went with which person’s surname, their pet, and what they did on vacation? The pet owner who went to the beach has a four-legged pet. All the woman have surnames with less letters than their given names. Logic games. Eventually your string of clues gives you what you need to puzzle your way through it and before you know it, Meredith White and her puppy were at the beach!

Now imagine you’re an astronomer. You’ve got access to a ground-based telescope, and as the year progresses, you’ve got different parts of the sky to look at and what you’re doing is a similar thing, only you’ve divided the sky into slices and your trying to figure out which sections of the sky have gas clouds, which have comets, which have asteroids, which have dwarf planets, and—most elusive of all—where exactly is Planet X: the potential tenth planet that might explain some of the odd orbits of things in the outer solar system.

At the start, you might only know that asteroids always clump in at least pairs—so if there’s an asteroid in section 3 of the sky, there’s going to be at least one asteroid in section 2 or section 4. But you’re trying to research, scan, and otherwise put together the clues you need to find Planet X, by figuring out the “rules” of this particular night sky and following the logic until you can say, “I know where Planet X is.”

That’s the game. And it’s way more fun than I thought it would be.

Turning, Turning…

The physical board game itself is a big ol’ wheel, with about half of the sky visible at one time (because the Earth rotates and night is only half that time) and that adds the first wrinkle to the game. You can do a search of the sky for one particular object (scan a number of sections of the sky saying ‘how many of these have gas clouds?’ for example), or you can do some research (learn a new logic rule of the game, like “no asteroid is opposite a comet”).

The various options take more or less time, which is cleverly represented on the board by moving your little observatory ahead a number of slices of the night sky, with whoever is the furthest behind getting the next turn (so it’s possible to have less turns than other players because they’re choosing options that take less time than you did), and then the night sky shifts (this is a big ol’ wheel, and it’s really clever) which means new sections of the sky are now available to be scanned—and previous sections aren’t—as what portion of the night sky is visible rotates throughout the game.

Those two simple mechanics—moving your piece forward more or less depending on what action you’ve chosen, and the rotating night sky chasing after the players—add another level of consideration: you can only scan parts of the sky that are visible, and your actions move your token, which means you can place yourself somewhere strategically on one turn specifically to ensure that when it’s your turn again, the right portion of the sky is available for your next scan. Meanwhile, everyone else is scanning, making notes on their sheets, and trying to track down that wee little planet for themselves.

The App

Where The Search for Planet X succeeded where I found Mansions of Madness fell flat for me was the simplicity. The App is entirely about delivering those clues I mentioned. That’s it. It doesn’t have mini-games or much complexity, it just spits out the answers to “how many comets are there in sections 8 through 12?” or “Tell me a piece of research involving gas clouds and asteroids.” It’s text on a screen, and while you’re using it each turn, it’s quick enough, and you take that information and use your night-sky worksheet, crossing out things you’ve learned don’t make sense, and narrowing down where Planet X might be.

(The only caveat I have for the app is at the end, when I put in where I thought Planet X was, the app asked me to tell it where Planet X was, and what was to either side of it, and something about the way it was worded left me confused and I entered it wrong even though I was correct, which was a small hiccough, but still derailed us a bit in figuring out the final score.)

There’s more to it than this: there are particular points around the cycle of the night sky where you can each place tokens in a particular part of the sky where you’re willing to gamble “this is where I believe there’s a comet/this slice of the sky is empty/pretty sure this is a gas cloud” for extra points at the end of the game, as well as the ability to simply ask the game “what is in this one particular section of the sky” (which you can do twice in the game each, with the caveat that it will report the sky as a false negative “empty” if Planet X is there).

Ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy a board game with an app component for the first time. Every time I’ve tried board games that required a digital component, it hasn’t felt like a positive, so it was really nice to find out it’s not a problem of the format for me so much as the implementation. Do you have any games that involve a mix of physical and digital you’ve enjoyed?