Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Subastral

Game: Subastral

Publisher: Renegade Game Studios

Designer: Ben Pinchback & Matt Riddle

Year: 2021

 

 

Subastral is a small-box card game for 2-5 players in which each player is collecting notes of the different biomes of plant Earth. You'll be treated to beautiful artwork from prolific board game artist, Beth Sobel decorating the cards for the eight different biome types, as well as the 6 central cloud cards which form a panorama.

 

Whilst Subastral has a serene and beautiful look to it and very simple card design, don't let its simple aesthetics fool you. While the rules are indeed simple, this set collection game treats you to some very elegant tricks when it comes to card selection and scoring, which will really get you thinking.

In a game of Subastral, each player starts with a hand of three cards. Each turn, you play a card into the central 'market' area, placing on the pile equal to its value. You can then take one stack of cards positioned to the left of the card you placed and take those cards (plus one face-down from the deck) into your hand. Or, alternatively, you can take all cards from a stack to the right of where you played and place them into your tableau in front of you. Your tableau is built following strict rules. Cards are always placed into a column of matching artwork/environment type, or if the cards are from a new biome, then they must be placed to the right of cards previously placed. The game proceeds in this way, with players taking turns until the game end card is revealed.

Scoring then takes place based on you tableau. You'll score points for complete rows of cards, starting on the left, of your tableau. You'll also score for your two largest sets of any biome, but, importantly, these biome sets will score with a multiplier based on their position in your tableau, so it's far better to build up big sets towards the right hand side of your tableau.

 

I've never felt so much need to take account of the make-up of the card deck than I do in Subastral. The biomes come in three different levels of rarity. If your strategy for the game is going to be to try and collect many cards from a certain biome, then you probably want to focus on those with high numbers of cards in the deck, but in order to get those sets to be as far right in your tableau as possible, you need to take some other cards first. On the other hand, if you're going to try for mixed sets, it's best to make your first few columns the more common cards to try and start more than one good row in your tableau. What we've tended to find is that it's tricky to win if you try and do a bit of both, but sometimes, the way the cards fall means you probably won't be able to focus on only one strategy.

 

It can sometimes be a little difficult to work with the cards you have available. Your starting hand can be a reasonably large factor in whether you're able to access some of the early cards you want, and later in the game, player interaction ramps up so that other players will likely be trying to avoid leaving you anything lucrative. You need to stay adaptable and keep in mind the importance of taking some helpful numbered cards into your hand. With the best will in the world, even a good player seems to be able to have a bad game of Subastral because the cards don't fall well. But with just 10 or 15 minute play time at two players, there's always time for another game.

 

 

Subastral reminds me of a couple of cards games which have a great reputation. I can certainly see a link between it and Piepmatz, from the same designers, with its clever scoring and new take of set collection. The nature theme and artwork, as well as the critical nature of how you play your cards into a tableau, remind me of Arboretum, which has the same artist as Subastral. With both comparisons though, I think that Subastral is a slightly lower complexity game and for me that's a big plus. Both Arboretum and Piepmatz eventually left our collection because they were a bit too antagonistic and tricksy. Subastral still has some of those moments of tough decisions and hard situations, often caused by the other people around the table, but it has a shorter playtime and I always love to suggest another game when things don't go quite as planned for me. It's slightly lighter, but for me, no less satisfying and the lighter style fits with the beautiful art to create a game I want to relax with for many years to come.

For the Yellow Meeple, Subastral is an 8/10.

 

Subastral was a review copy provided by Asmodee UK. It is available at your friendly local game store or can be picked up at http://www.365games.co.uk