You’ve got a ship, a crew, and a dream—but so does everyone else. Who will be able to take home the most gold?
What Is Space Freight?
Space Freight is a resource management game for to 2 to 5 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 30 to 60 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $67 for a copy of the game. The game rules aren’t too complex so I think you could go perhaps as young as 10 as long as they can handle some direct conflict in the game.
Update: The publishers have canceled the Kickstarter campaign and are planning to do some more work on it before trying to relaunch later on.
Space Freight was designed by Tyler Cheves and Brendon Cheves and published by Waterworks Games and Healthy Pixels, with art by Tyler Cheves, Francois Lmx, mich_the_boring, steiner_art, and Mofei W.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Space Freight Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. One particular note is that some of the placeholder images on the prototype were created with generative AI, but the publisher told me that they have been working with several artists to replace AI images with illustrations. I’m personally not in favor of AI-generated images so I’m glad they’re being replaced, but that does mean I don’t know which illustrations you’ll see in my photos will be in the finished game.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Game board
- 5 Ships
- 50 Gold cubes
- 30 Citrine cubes
- 30 Emerald cubes
- 30 Sapphire cubes
- 30 Ruby cubes
- 30 Scrap cubes
- 30 Amethyst cubes
- 15 Mission tiles
- Metallic Gold D4 die
- 6 Plastic D6 dice
- 5 Player Aid cards
- 81 cards
One of the big gimmicks for Space Freight is that there is no rulebook. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules—but instead of a big rulebook to read, the rules themselves are printed on the cardboard panels that serve as lids to the four plastic trays that hold all of the components. Each panel describes what’s in that tray, and you simply read them as you open the trays, setting up the game and learning the rules as you go. There’s a little welcome sheet at the top of the box that explains all of this, and also includes a QR code in case you’d prefer to watch a video instead.
The plastic ships are quite large—each one can hold up to 12 resource cubes on it, and they also serve as your player piece for moving around the board (which is also a large six-fold board). The cubes themselves are a standard size, and the gemstones and scrap are plastic, while the “gold” cubes are made of metal and have an impressive heft to them. The dice for the trading exchange are similar: one plastic die for each of the six resources, and then a metallic D4 for the gold.
The panels and trays make it pretty easy to get set up, and the tray for the resources is particularly useful because you can just set the whole tray next to the board as a supply. The one complaint I have about the resources is that there is a yellow resource (called “citrine”) and there’s the actual gold, but because of other games players often refer to the citrine as “gold” and then it can be confusing. Also, the names for all of the resources are only shown on this particular rules panel—everywhere else it just uses the icons, which are small enough that it can be easy to mix up things like sapphire and emerald depending on the lighting. The icons are different, but when they’re very tiny and you see one of them from across the table, chances are you didn’t memorize the differences.
How to Play Space Freight
There is no rulebook, but you can watch a How to Play video here. The rules are printed across four panels, with some FAQs and clarifications on the backs of the panels—you can download the panels here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to have the most points by the time the gold supply runs out.
Setup
Set up the board with the resource tray nearby. Place the scrap cubes on the board in space (just anywhere not on a planet or the trading exchange); the rest of the cubes stay in the tray.
Put the D4 in the center of the trading exchange set to “1,” and then roll the other six dice and place them randomly in the six spaces around the trading exchange. Shuffle the two stacks of mission tiles (there are 6-value tiles and 8-value tiles) and place them in the mission center, face-up.
Give each player a ship, a player aid card, and a set of starting crew: 3 Dockworkers, 1 Miner, 1 Scavenger, and 1 Trader. Players will start with some gold based on turn order. Place your ship on its starting home base dock, and your gold in storage near your home base.
Shuffle the cards and place the deck in the indicated slot, and reveal six cards to form the market.
Gameplay
On your turn, you may take two actions from the following:
- Load/Unload: Move any number of resources between your storage and your ship while docked at home.
- Move: Move from any dock space into space, or move from space to any open docking space. (Special: you may move from one dock to another at the trading exchange for a single move rather than having to move into space first.)
- Mine: While docked at a planet, gain cubes of that color onto your ship.
- Salvage: While in space, collect cubes from space into your ship.
- Trade: While docked at the trading exchange, trade resources.
- Mission: While docked at the mission center, turn in resources to complete a mission and earn gold.
- Displace: Move ships from docks into space (requires Saboteur crew).
- Swap: Trade resources with another ship while you’re both in space (requires Spacemonger crew).
- Buy: Buy a card from the market row.
The strength of many of the actions is affected by how many crew you have. For instance, at the beginning of the game you have one Scavenger, so a salvage action lets you take 1 cube. If you had 3 Scavengers, then you could pick up 3 cubes for 1 action. Dockworkers give you capacity for your ship—you start with 3 Dockworkers so your ship capacity is 6 cubes; at the end of your turn if you have more than your capacity in your ship, you must choose cubes to jettison into space, where they could be salvaged by any players on future turns.
When trading, you may exchange resources matching the two dice next to your ship, as well as gold, and the exchange rate is equal to the values of the dice. For instance, in the photo above, the ruby die is 3, the amethyst die is 4, and the gold die is 1, so you may make any swaps at a ratio of 3 rubies : 4 amethyst : 1 gold. Your trader crew cards give you more trades per action; you may also use a trade to increase or decrease one of the D6 next to your ship, manipulating the economy. (Note that there is no amethyst planet, so the only way to get amethyst is through trading.)
If you dock at the mission center, you may turn in the required resources shown on one of the mission tiles to gain the gold payment, and you also take the mission tile, which is worth 1 point. Remember: you still have to get the gold back home safely!
You may buy cards from the market no matter where your ship is located, but you may only spend resources that are already in your storage, not from your ship. Crew cards will make your actions more efficient, and Boost cards are single-use cards that usually give you an extra action after you play them, letting you set up a powerful turn if you can time it right.
Officer cards are the most expensive, each costing 8 resources, but they give you an ongoing ability for the rest of the game. The Engineer can move directly to any open docking space without stopping in space; the Quartermaster can unload directly to your storage from space without being docked at home.
Game End
The game ends when all of the gold has been moved to player’s storage (so if it’s still floating in space or on a player’s ship, the game isn’t over yet!).
Players earn points for all of their crew, officers, and mission tiles, and 1 point per gold in their storage. The highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most remaining boost cards, and then the most crew cards.
Why You Should Play Space Freight
I first came across Space Freight because of an ad on social media, and what caught my attention was the claim that there was no rulebook. I’d just recently read the “Every Board Game Rulebook Is Awful” paper and so I was particularly intrigued—how well can you learn a game without a rulebook? How hard would it be to look things up mid-game? How complex can a game be if it’s explained on four panels?
I discovered that the publisher, Waterworks Games, is local to me here in Portland, Oregon. The designers (whom I haven’t met yet) are also local, and they’ve been working on this game through a meetup called the Stumptown Gamecrafters’ Guild, where designers get together to work on game prototypes and playtest games. And now they’ve added the Kickstarter process to their list of topics: last night’s meetup was about the launch of this very Kickstarter campaign, including information about the costs of advertising and manufacturing the game, and the project was launched during the meetup. (I haven’t attended any of the meetups myself but I may eventually find some time on my calendar.) The publisher loaned me a prototype so I could try the game for myself and see what this “no-rulebook” space game was like.
The unpacking and setting up was pretty easy: each panel included mostly rules about the components that were in that tray, so the first one had the player ships (all but one, which was in the 3rd tray) and explained that you get 2 actions and showed how you moved between docks and space. The one rule we missed the first time I played was that loading and unloading was itself an action and not free—we saw that you could load/unload any combination, but missed that it cost an action to do so.
The backs of the panels have some more specific details—for instance, listing all of the boost cards and officer cards, or explaining the different crew card abilities, but we did find that for the most part the game was straightforward enough that we usually didn’t need to refer to them. We did have a couple of questions that were not on the FAQ (and the BGG forums for Space Freight are still pretty slim as yet), so I just had to email the publisher about those. The one thing about having the rules on the four panels is that it’s a little awkward to sort through them and flip back and forth to look for information later. It’s good that there are only four of them, at least.
So, while Space Freight technically does not have a rulebook, some of my players felt like the panels were essentially the same as a rulebook. But it is a game that doesn’t overload you with too many rules up front, and I felt like we were able to get the game set up and start playing pretty quickly—whether that’s more a function of the panels or the overall complexity of the game is not entirely certain.
Okay, so how’s the gameplay?
Your turns are pretty short, particularly at the beginning, because most of your actions are fairly simple. It’ll take you two actions just to fly your ship somewhere and dock, and then maybe on your second turn all you do is mine two gems if you made it to a planet. Or, perhaps you started by loading some gold into your ship with the intentions of trading. Your goal is to just accumulate as much gold in your storage as you can, but there are multiple ways to go about that.
If you see that the markets have made a particular gem more valuable (if the die is low, you can trade fewer gems per gold), then maybe it’s worth making a run to that planet so you can load up and then go trading. Or, maybe there’s a good combination where you could take your starting gold and trade it for some gems that are needed for a mission. Either way, the two primary sources of gold are the trading exchange and the mission center, turning gems and scrap (however you managed to acquire them) into gold, and then shuttling that back home.
Powering up your actions with crew is also key, and each crew member can be purchased with a specific type of resource or you can spend gold, though that’s usually if you’re desperate to beat somebody else to the punch. Dockworkers increase your ship capacity so you don’t have to fly back and forth as often, and Miners and Scavengers let you gain more cubes per action. Traders make your trading stops more efficient, both because you can manipulate the market dice but also because you can make more trades per action.
Then we get to the other crew: Saboteurs and Spacemongers. You don’t start with any, but as soon as somebody acquires these, we’ve moved from Space Freight to Space Fight. Saboteurs let you dislodge players from their docks, putting them into space. That’s handy if somebody’s mining a planet but you want those gems, or if they’re hogging the space you need at the trading exchange. But the real one-two punch comes when you have Spacemongers, which let you swap resources on your ship with somebody else—why go to the trouble of mining gems and then trading them at the exchange, when you can just hang about in space, maybe scavenge some scrap metal, and then dump it on those merchants and take their gold? You get so many more actions if you don’t have to spend them docking and undocking all the time.
The Shapeshifter is a special crew that is very expensive, but every turn you can decide which crew it is, so it gives you a lot of flexibility. Carrying a lot of cargo? It’s a dockworker this time. Time to mine? Let’s make it a Miner.
Finally, there are boost cards—these all cost 1 gold, which means you’re spending a point to acquire them, but they give you really amazing effects once. You might be able to manipulate dice at the trading exchange (including the gold die!), increase your ship’s capacity temporarily, or get a boosted mine, salvage, or swap action. Whenever a boost card comes up in the market, everyone should take a look at it because even if it’s not directly useful for you, it may be worth buying so your opponent can’t use it against you.
Once the game gets going, things can get pretty heated. Multiple players want to be on the same planet, or are racing for particular resources because an officer card just appeared in the market. If you see somebody collecting resources that match a mission tile, is it worth trying to outpace them, or do you go for something else instead? When you’re done trading at the exchange, do you use some of your trade abilities to change the die and make the exchange rate worse for everyone else?
Mission tiles are worth 1 point just for completing them, but also give you a decent amount of gold. The problem is, if there are Spacemongers about, there’s no guarantee you’ll get that gold home to storage. In our games, it was often a dilemma whether it was more efficient to complete missions or trade resources for gold, and one of the limiting factors was always the amount of time it took to fly back and forth between locations.
The different crews between players can also make for some funny outcomes. In one game, one player had a lot of spacemongers so if they accumulated enough of anything, they could swap out and take pretty much my whole stash of gold before I got it home. But I realized I had a lot of Scavengers and they didn’t—so if I jettisoned all my gold into space, at most they could get 2 of them in a turn, and I could try to scoop up the rest and flee for home!
There can be a bit of a stalemate, though, depending on how determined players are. If you have gold and you’re not in space, it will take you at least two turns just to get home, and then you can’t unload until your next turn. But that means you’re a sitting duck for anyone who has a Saboteur and some Spacemongers. If they undock you and take some gold, do you try to get it back, or just go back home and unload whatever you have left? We had some long tug-of-wars over gold in one of the games I played and eventually one player just had to give in so the game wouldn’t go on too long.
The officers are a game-changer, and since there are only five of them in the entire deck, there’s no guarantee that you’ll even see all of them in any given game. We did feel like the Engineer, which allows you to teleport anywhere, felt like it was the most valuable of them, because saving an extra action per turn just lets you unload gold before anyone else can get to you, and it feels unstoppable. Some of the others can be pretty handy, but nothing really compares to teleportation. I would have liked to see either some more officers, either multiple copies of the same ones or some additional powers, because it’s possible that the player who’s first to get an officer can just run away with the game.
Overall, Space Freight is a solid pick-up-and-deliver game that can spark some really exciting moments, but can also feel a bit limiting at times because you only get 2 actions and flying through space is time-consuming. It does a good job getting players up and running, and may be more geared toward those who like a lower-complexity game. The components have a fun toy factor with the ships carrying the cubes around the board, and the trays do make everything a snap to set up and put away after you’re done.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Space Freight Kickstarter page!
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.
