Family Focus Review
These reviews provide insight on some of the best games for families with young gamers. Written from a parent’s perspective for a fun and educational family game night!
In Battle Beyond Space, you are one of four races that have sent a fleet of ships to an asteroid field to recover an ancient artifact from a long extinct race. Deploy your fleet, move your ships and eliminate the other contending races. Your time is limited but your race has a unique power to help your cause. After nine turns, points are calculated. The player who has destroyed the most opposing ships, and collected the most ancient satellites without falling prey to his rivals’ fleets wins…
Nice review, and I was definitely going for either a 80’s Milton Bradley-style game or a sort of Beer & Beer & Pretzels game.
I’ve taught it to children as young as 7 for demos, making sure to give them the easier-to-manage powers.
The game is also a bit deeper than you might at first think. (Just a bit). As we were playtesting, and learned who had which powers, we began to start trying to divine a player’s power. Which also brought in the occasional bluff.
I’ve also never been concerned with the number of choice on a turn, and prefer games with few, but more significant choices. BBS definitely trims down the number choices for speed. It doesn’t always present interesting options, but occasionally slaps you in the face with a spectacularly tricky one.
As another comment, some of those older MB hobby games are still awesome. The ones that see play here are: Thunder Road, Battle Masters, Screaming Eagles, and Die Schlact der Dinosaurier. (The last is by Schmidt in Germany, but designed by the guy who did Battle Masters and Heroquest.)
@Morlimar Thanks! I sort of figured as such… but it might be good for my six year old. I’ll see if the FLGS has a copy to try.
@Granny
Just wanted to chime in and say that BBS isn’t a 4x game – There is no exploration or expansion – just exploitation ( sort of) and mostly Extermination.. so really 1 X game: Extermination. Being set in space is just about all it shares with games like Eclipse, TI3 and Cosmic Encounter. It’s really its own entity – Plays fast and requires little grey matter – almost a abstract strategy game with ships. So ya its good for younger geeks and families – but if they are ahead of the curve in gaming complexity then it may not be enough game to satisfy.
I love the Family Focus Review posts and agree that they would make another great exploration category. *nudge, nudge*
As a very visually oriented person, I have to say that this game doesn’t really appeal that much to me, even though I love the concept. I will definitely keep it in mind as a game to pick up and play at some point, but for now I think I’ll stick to my go-to space game, Space Alert. I also have Gunship: First Strike and Galaxy Truckers to satisfy my space theme cravings for now.
My son just turned three and we’re working on counting, so the giant inflatable D6 I own are going to get some good use as I introduce him to a few basic games and work our way up. I’ll have to pick up an over-sized polyhedral dice set so he can “play games like daddy” in the near future. 🙂
Hmmm… I’ve been avoiding this game, because I already have several 4X games I love like Eclipse, and a few shorter games like Galactic Empires. However, if this game can truly be played by my six year old, I’m very intrigued.
BTW I too, think this would be a great Explorer feature… +1
Yeah, totally agree. My wee boy is just over a year old so I’m constantly on the look out for games I can start playing with him as soon as possible 🙂
I agree that family focus would be an excellent fit for game exploration quests. My daughter is 3, and while we’ve dabbled in games, she’s quickly falling behind Urosh’s learning curve. 🙂
Family Focus would be a great theme for the next round of Game Exploration quests. My son is only 15 months old now, but I have an aggressive board game learning curve already planned out.
By 3-4, he’ll be playing a bunch of family and kids games. By 5-6, we’ll move into Carcassonne and Catan. Push thru the Euro-games by the time he’s 7-8 years old, and by 10 we’ll be playing Die Macher.
First step…get him to stop eating meeples…