Space Freaks Review

Critical Hits: Fun, obnoxious setting and concept; plenty of light-hearted violence; great for 2, 3 or 4 players with greater tactical play for 2, greater mayhem for 4.
Critical Misses: Underdeveloped; coarse rules; inconsistent play quality.

When you come into a game that comes in an obnoxious pink box with embossed fluorescent green laser blasts and that game is called Space Freaks, you should have a couple of expectations. One is that this is likely not a Stefan Feld design. Another is that you should expect something raucous, ridiculous and most likely funny. This Finnish import brought over by Stronghold mostly manages to meet my expectations for this kind of game and it actually surprised me a little bit but it is also one of those titles that stands on the shoulders of giants...and it struggles a little to make a case for itself over its esteemed predecessors.

A joke for old school Eurogamers - I wondered if you could play Magna Grecia on this board.

When I first played Space Freaks, I made mental notes about which games it directly reminded me of and that list included Cosmic Encounter, Wiz-War, Gammarauders, Duel of Ages 2, and Games Workshop's recent hit Shadespire. This is a great list of games and among them are at least two of my all-time favorites. This is a weird, wild arena battle wherein each player assembles a custom Space Freak out of cards for the head, torso, arms and legs. That's the Gammarauders bit, for those who don't recall that long lost TSR classic. Each of these elements affects the statistics and capabilities of your freaks, which are notated through a system of icons and numerical values. These mis-matched critters might have really strong ranged attacks but below average movement and low health. Or you might put together a Freak that is a total bruiser in melee, fleet on their fleet, and they can self-destruct. There are a ton of possibilities, and the goofy sub-Barlowe's illustrations make for some rather unusual looking creatures.

The kind you don't take home to mama.

Each player controls a team of three of these bespoke freaks, which are placed on a large hex map. With that noted, it's as good a time as any in this review to note that there are some pretty old school elements about this design, and it feels very much like something from the wilderness years of the early 1990s. The map has some terrain features, such as deadly acid pits, impassible rocks, laser walls, laboratories and healing centers. Each turn, the Arena Master overseeing this bloodsport plays an event card that affects everyone- this can lead to some rather unexpected situations or turns of fortune. Then, players select one mission card out of the three in their hand and that gives them a short-term, points-generating objective. This is the part that reminds me of Shadespire, with its similar mission cards. The difference here is that you lock this in on your turn, so the impetus is to meet the requirements as you play it out. You might have to put a Freak in a lab, KO an enemy Freak, get three into the central landing zone, those kinds of things. I really like this mechanic.

Once you've got your marching orders, you set about moving your freaks and earning points for the mission as well for killing enemy freaks. You've got a hand of Sponsor cards that may give you extra weapons, boost movement, let you create a wormhole, or even bring on Aliens or Droids to fight on your side. You can spend a Sponsor card to build a bunker (respawn point) or a turret (to shoot things, of course).

This could be a rebus having to do with Harry Potter and Thor. Or it could be just some card illustrations.

Line of sight matters, but there are no dice- combat is just a comparative of damage versus armor. Some Freak parts let you do some retaliatory damage. Once a Freak is KO'd, they go off the board until the end of the owning player's turn, when they respawn either at the player's deployment zone or a bunker. So this is a game where one turn you might have all three of your freaks killed, but then on the next one you are the one doing the killing.

So this is all pretty fun, and as predicted it is raucous, ridiculous, and funny. Like Wiz-War, it's the kind of game where players just brutalize each other but wild twists and circumstances create unusual tactical situations. There are some fun-stoppers, however. One is that the game is probably a little more cluttered and complicated than it really needs to be- for example, I'm not crazy about there being two different kinds of damage, one for hitting Freaks and one for damaging Structures. And there are card issues and a general lack of clarity among both those and the rulebook. It is also an extremely volatile game (see: Wiz-War and Cosmic Encounter) which means that it is a somewhat inconsistent experience. Bad cards and imbalanced powers can lead to a bad play- especially if you get alpha-striked into oblivion early in the game and find yourself on the back heel, trying to make up for a turn or turns where all of your Freaks were down until the clean-up phase.

I also feel like this design lacks the intangible, indefinable element of genius that separates it from Cosmic and Wiz-War. Even though it is really quite novel compared to many games on the market today, it simply does not feel as definitive as its influencers. It doesn't seem as complete, holistic, and committed as those games did, and ultimately it comes across as somewhat flaky. There are a lot of cool, fun ideas here- but in almost every instance I could point to another, more fully formed game that I'd choose to play over Space Freaks.

But I like the spirit of Space Freaks a lot and I appreciate this kind of game in general. I love that it has that kind of wild, unpolished feeling that some of the American hobby games before Catan had. But that feeling doesn't always equate to a design I want to come back to again and again, and I've found that this is really the kind of game that often makes me want to play something else. But if you don't have that something else, then this is still a fine, fun game.