You’ve just been woken out of hypersleep—something is wrong on the Pandora Celeste. Work together to disable to ship’s emergency protocols before you’re flushed out into the vacuum of space, but be warned that some of your fellow crewmates may be working for the Company.
What Is Pandora Celeste?
Pandora Celeste is a semi-cooperative sci-fi game for 1 to 6* players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 90 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Gamefound, with a pledge level of £47 (about $60USD) for the base game and £70 (about $90USD) for the deluxe edition; there are also tiers available for a print-and-play or a copy of the the prototype if you just can’t wait to get your hands on it and start playing. The game’s settings are largely inspired by the Alien series, though the illustrations have a cartoony quality that makes it a bit friendlier; that said, the game does have a lot of rules to learn so I probably wouldn’t go much younger than 14 except with kids who have some experience and patience with longer games.
Pandora Celeste was designed by Mike Ibeji and published by Guntower Games, with illustrations by Rick Bastos, James Dunn, and Kristian Fosh.
*The base game includes 4 characters, and the deluxe edition adds 2 more characters in case you want to play with more than 4 players.
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Pandora Celeste Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and does not reflect final component quality. I was loaned a prototype of the base game, which goes up to 4 players.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Ship board
- 4 Crew decks
- 4 Crew standees
- 4 Player mats
- 6 Emergency Protocol cards
- 8 Agenda cards
- 15 Scenario cards
- 5 Scenario Nasty tokens
- 9 Scenario tokens
- 9 Nasty Action cards
- 3 Big Nasty cards
- 3 Big Nasty standees + 1 Hunter Drones token
- 20 Ship Deck and Safe cards
- 12 Ship Deck tokens
- 9 Memory cards
- 9 Memory tokens
- 6 Spare Noise cards
- 6 Door standees
- 11 Objective/No Entry tokens
- 20 Wound tokens
- 15 Fire tokens
- 9 Vent cards
- 4 Vent Nasty tokens
The most distinctive component in Pandora Celeste is the box itself, which incorporates magnetic flaps so that the whole thing unfolds and becomes the game board, with a section for the ship map, and various side panels for storing the decks of cards and and some card play areas. I noticed that the base game (the version I played) has a ship map that is mostly contained on the bottom of the box, but the deluxe edition expands that map onto the lid of the box as well, making it twice as large. That does mean that the base game takes up the same amount of space on your table, but you don’t really use about half of it (though you can store tokens and additional cards there).
The game also makes use of the clear plastic box insert, too: there are raised platforms on the top edge that represent the vents where you can climb up and crawl around in the air ducts. It makes for a neat effect in terms of literally raising those standees above the floor level, but there are also some drawbacks: depending on the lighting, you can get some reflections and glare off the walls of the insert, making it harder to see tokens in the rooms or arrows printed on the board (like the yellow arrow at the bottom right between the Changing Rooms and the Cryo Chamber). It can also make it tricker to pick up or flip over tokens when they’re in the narrower “rooms.” Of course, if that bothers you, you can simply remove the insert and play without it—the vents are also printed on the map itself.
The illustration style is a little more cartoony, so even though there are deadly aliens roaming the ship, the artwork isn’t too scary. There’s a lot of detail, from the border on the cards and the “switch” appearance of the action icons to the ship map itself. It helps the Pandora Celeste feel lived in, but can also look a little cluttered, depending on your tastes, and some of the gameplay elements can get a little lost in the things added for flavor and theme. In some cases, gameplay elements are the thematic elements: certain items are placed in rooms that have a wrench illustration on the floor, and the emergency lighting is also used in setup—it integrates them into the scene, but can make them harder to spot than an obvious icon.
In addition to the main rulebook, there’s also a tutorial book that includes a prologue and then walks you through four scenarios, which gradually introduces new game concepts. There’s also a smaller booklet, the Xeno Data Log, that lists all of the different nasties you’ll encounter in the game and how they behave.
How to Play Pandora Celeste
You can download a draft of the rulebook here. Since the game builds up over the course of four scenarios and then includes a “full game,” I’ll give a broader overview and try not to get too lost in the details here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to survive! In the full game, you’ll have a secret agenda to fulfill and generally you want to find a way off the ship before time runs out. The scenarios have other specific goals like assembling a flamethrower to deal with a bug infestation or, uh, putting out the fire you started while fighting the bugs.
Setup
Each player gets a player mat and the starting cards of for their character, drawing a hand of 5 cards. Your starting location will be determined by which scenario you’re playing. Various tokens will be seeded face-down around the ship as well—these include tools you can pick up, “memories” you can recover to take new actions, and nasties in hiding.
For the full game, everyone will get an agenda card, and you’ll also have a certain number of Emergency Protocol cards in place, and there are supplies of the various cards set in their spaces around the board.
Gameplay
Players take turns, playing one card to take an action per turn, until somebody passes. Then, everyone else can take two actions and then must pass and the round ends, at which point the nasties will take a turn.
Each card has one or two yellow “switches” at the top corner—when you play a card, you choose one of the switches and do all of the actions in that switch: move around the ship, open locks, pick up items, and fight. Little nasties generally ignore you when you’re in the room with them, but if you leave the room without using a “sneak” action then they’ll try to hit you. Your action cards also have a noise meter at the bottom: green, yellow, amber, or red. Whoever makes the most noise during a round will become the first player and the primary target for the nasties.
As you explore the ship, you reveal tokens when you enter a room—these might be nasties (which are then ready to attack), tools or weapons that can be equipped in your tool slot, or memories (actions that you add to your hand).
As you take damage, you’ll lose cards and place them on the wound tracker across the top of your player mat—if you get your 8th wound, you die … and you can either start a new character or play as the nasties. There are some ways to heal, but you can only heal cards of your own player color, so typically the cards that you’ve picked up during the game cannot be healed.
The nasty action cards are used for a few things, including resolving attacks: you flip the top card of the deck and see if you draw a “hit” or “miss,” and you use either the top or bottom depending on whether it’s a big or little nasty, or if you’re hitting with a weapon or your fists. Big nasties and weapons have a better hit rate than little nasties and fists.
The nasty action cards are also used at the end of the round to determine what each nasty will do: you draw a card for each one and do what it says. The most common action is “Follow Instincts,” which will then do the action printed on the nasty’s own card (and is detailed in the Xeno Data Log).
In the full game, each Emergency Protocol has its own countdown and you need to shut it off before the countdown reaches zero and the ship purges all the crew or turns off the oxygen or something. However, be careful: each time you shut off a protocol, there’s a chance that it spawns a Big Nasty, and you don’t want to run into one of those!
After all of the emergency protocols are shut off, the ship will trigger “abandon ship” and you can now escape the ship if you can get to one of the escape pods and activate all of the seats. It’s easier to do with more people helping, but since you each have your own secret agenda, you may not be working together! Some of the agendas are “Company” agendas—if you think somebody’s working for the Company, you can “call them out” or attack them, but if you’re wrong there are some really harsh consequences!
Game End
The game ends when somebody completes their agenda and escapes (and wins!)—or when everyone on the ship is dead (potentially because the countdown reaches zero).
Why You Should Play Pandora Celeste
Pandora Celeste is billed as a “gleeful love letter to sci-fi monster movies” and it’s clear that a big portion of that love is for the Alien franchise. You’re stuck on a ship with aliens that hatch out of egg pods and burrow into you if they get the chance, there’s an android character who is most likely working for the Company, and a kid who is particularly skilled at hiding out in the vents. Aside from a big alien with a passing resemblance to the xenomorphs, the other two Big Nasties that you might face are the Trophy Hunter (a la Predator) and the undying killer robot RNE 5W2NGR (hmm, who could that be?).
The semi-cooperative nature of the game works well: you all have your own secret agendas, but somebody has to shut down the emergency protocols or nobody’s going to survive. That means at the start of the game there’s a bit of a scramble: you want to arm yourself with better cards, but you don’t want to take too long to deal with the alarms. Running through the ship can be dangerous, too, because it’ll catch the attention of the little nasties if you run through their room without sneaking. Crawling through the vents can get you past some of the critters, but be warned: every step you take through the vents requires you to draw a card from the Vents deck, which could be useful or could be … more critters.
Once you’ve all dealt with the emergencies, though, it’s a race to complete your agendas and get out—but who do you want to escape with? Exit routes are limited, and if there’s a Big Nasty on its way you might just cooperate with anyone else to get the shuttle decoupled. On the other hand, if you think the other player is working against you, maybe it’s worth a couple of turns to slow them down? If any nasties get into the escape pods with you, there’s a final showdown—one last fight to see who survives. Of course, one of the options is to flush them out the airlock, but you gotta make sure you’re holding onto something or you’ll get flushed out too!
Fighting is pretty easy to resolve, and the use of the small deck of cards means that you can get a sense of the odds of a hit or miss based on what’s already been played. (There are a couple of cards that force a reshuffle, so you never reach the end of the deck and make the result totally definite.) And if you’re feeling lucky, you can gamble on a second card, which can either reduce or increase the damage. It could mean the difference between taking out a bug in one action rather than having to attack it again on your next turn.
There are a bunch of different actions that you can take, particularly if you get your hands on some of the tools and weapons scattered around the ship. Break into a safe or a locker to rifle through the items there; barricade doors behind you to slow down the nasties; you can even play a “You First” card to force another player to become the primary target for that round, regardless of who made the most noise.
In one game, I was running toward the bridge escape pod by crawling through the vents, because RNE was trying to track me down: I was carrying a “smoking gun,” the evidence needed to finally bring down the Company. One of our crewmates had destroyed his own smoking gun the minute RNE appeared and ran for the escape pod at the back of the ship—I figured he was a Company man and wasn’t going to help me. Meanwhile, my other crewmate ran for the bridge as well, telling me that he had a plan to deal with RNE if I could get him there. I’d taken several wounds and had no weapons, so I needed all the help I could get, so I led RNE to the bridge and stayed in the vents. It turned out that Cargo also had a Company agenda: he wanted to trap a live specimen and bring it back! Unfortunately, his trap failed, and we ended up perishing as RNE recovered the smoking gun and dispatched us both—while the third crewmate made good on his escape and was presumably rewarded handsomely by the Company.
Pandora Celeste is one of those games that can make for some great story moments like that, but it takes some effort to get there. Playing through the scenarios does help to ease players into the game’s many rules, as long as you’re willing to spend the time on four sessions to really learn it. You can skip over some of the sessions if you’ve got an experienced group of gamers, but the rulebooks are really organized by scenario. It reminded me a little bit of Stationfall, another game with lots of chaos in space, hidden agendas, and escape pods, though Stationfall is perhaps even more overwhelming in terms of what you can do on each turn. It takes a lot of rules in order to allow for all sorts of situations like hull breaches and fire spreading; some folks will love the possibilities and some folks will prefer a simpler ruleset. Pandora Celeste is definitely for the former.
If your gaming group loves Alien and is up for some pandemonium on a spaceship, visit the Pandora Celeste Gamefound page for more info or to make a pledge!
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Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.
