In “Reaping the Rewards,” I look at the finished product from a crowdfunding campaign. Last Light was originally funded through Gamefound in the spring of 2022 and began delivery to backers in October 2023.
Far in the future, the stars are dying, and alien civilizations gather around the remaining white dwarf stars to harvest the Last Light.
What Is Last Light?
Last Light is a 4X game for 2 to 4 players (up to 8 with the expansion), ages 14 and up, and takes over an hour to play. (I know, “over an hour” is pretty broad, but the box says “60+ minutes.” The actual game length will vary depending on number of players and how prone to analysis paralysis your players are, but I’ve had a 6-player game go for about 3 hours.)
After backers receive their copies, there will be a very limited number for sale on the Grey Fox Games website (though it is currently listed as “sold out”). However, there is a planned Gamefound campaign in January for a second print run, so if you’re interested you can sign up for the email newsletter at the bottom of that page to be notified when that happens.
The deluxe version of the base game retails for $129.99; the Infinity expansion (deluxe edition) is priced at $99.99. There are also bundles that include both (for $219.99), upgraded planets, and additional GameTrayz, plus there are add-ons for fancy dice and an alternate white dwarf star.
The game can be lengthy, but the actual game rules are not too complex for this type of game, and if you have experienced kids they may be able to enjoy it as long as they have the patience for it. It does help that much of the game is played simultaneously so there can be less downtime waiting for your turn.
Last Light was designed by Roy Cannaday and published by Grey Fox Games, with illustrations by Clark Miller.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Last Light Components
I was loaned a copy of the base game and the expansion in the deluxe versions, which is what Kickstarter backers received. The retail edition still includes the same planets, but most of the plastic components seen in my photos will be cardboard instead. (The light tokens are plastic crystals instead of the discs.) In addition, the retail game board does not have the UV gloss pattern seen in the deluxe edition.
Here’s what comes in the base game:
- Rotating board
- Dwarf Star
- 15 Planets (each with a base and a planetary ID ring)
- First Player marker
- 6 dice
- 83 Technology cards
- 15 Alien Faction cards
- 18 Common Planetary Exploration tokens
- 14 Rare Planetary Exploration tokens
- 12 Deep Space Exploration tokens
- 20 Attention tokens
- 30 Common Resource tokens (grey)
- 15 Uncommon Resource tokens (purple)
- 15 Rare Resource tokens (orange)
- 15 Large Light tokens
- 15 Small Light tokens
- 20 Damage tokens
- 7 Asteroids
- 4 sets of player components, each containing:
- Reference card
- Player board
- 4 Planetary Achievement cards
- 6 Action cards
- Colony Ship token
- 8 Extractors
- 5 Small Ships
- 3 Medium Ships
- 2 Large Ships
Not pictured above is the Infinity expansion, which primarily adds components for 4 more players, including some small board extension pieces and more planets. It also includes 10 additional alien faction cards to choose from—that’s the only gameplay difference that is added in the expansion.
In the deluxe edition, the ships are all plastic miniatures, and each player’s ships are different from each other. (In the retail edition, the ships are all cardboard tokens and I believe they use the same illustration for all of the players, just in different colors.) The plastic ships do give some fun personality to the ships, but the one thing that we sometimes had trouble with is that there is a significant size difference between some of them. The purple medium ship is close to the size of the blue and red small ships—so if you’re not careful you could make a mistake about who you’re getting into a fight with.
The expansion adds four more player colors (black, white, orange, green) but re-uses the models from the base game. My only complaints there are that the black ships can get easily lost on the black board, and that the orange color is not only fairly close to the yellow from the base game but uses the same models as the yellow—there would have been less room for confusion if the two similar colors had very different ship models.
The resource tokens are small plastic cylinders, and they’re pretty fancy: a grey “container” with a translucent core in the center. (These are cardboard tokens in the retail edition.) The container, depending on orientation, can obscure a good portion of the core, and depending on the lighting the grey and orange can look similar (as you can see on the right side of the photo). I always appreciate when components are distinguished by something other than just color or with more distinct color choices.
The planets themselves are the most “eye-candy” part of the game and come in both the retail and deluxe editions (though you can get even fancier planets as an add-on). They are large marbles, with some mixture of red, green, blue, and yellow. Each one has a small plastic stand and a cardboard ring that fits onto the base. The cardboard rings indicate which color resources are present, which is helpful because sometimes a planet that’s supposed to be blue and yellow may appear to have some green swirls on it. The rings do have some patterns to help distinguish the colors, but because they are small, visibility could still be an issue for color-blind players. The planets come in three sizes; the tray for the base game has enough slots to hold all of the planets from the base game and the expansion (the expansion box does not have a tray for the planets). The white dwarf star is a larger white and blue marble and has a modified base that fits in the center of the board.
The planetary exploration tokens are semi-circles that fit around the base of each planet; during setup, these will be placed face-down, and you reveal them when you travel to the planet. The token shows what the planet will produce, and may also have a grey section that shows a one-time bonus when it is first revealed. The planet rings are designed so that the planet’s colors repeat, so no matter which half is covered by the exploration token, you can still see all the colors on it.
There’s a lot to fit in a small amount of space: the base of the planet has the color ring, and then an exploration token on top of that, and then you might also have a player extractor as well. While technically you could just put the extractor in the space next to the planet, we found that it was often easy to miss those (especially because portions of the board rotate and then your extractor could be hidden behind the planet). So instead we placed our extractors on the planet base—but don’t cover up the resource it produces! As you can see in the photo above, the extractors are pretty tiny compared to a standard-sized die. (In the retail edition, the extractors are cardboard tokens but I don’t know how large they are or if they fit well on the base.)
The alien faction cards are oversized cards, with a big splash image of the alien, and then its name and special ability. It’s certainly fun to have the large illustration, particularly because a lot of the rest of the game has graphic design but not much in the way of illustrations; the downside is that these cards do take up a lot of precious table space during a game that can be quite sprawling (especially with the added players with the expansion).
The main reason for those large cards, though, is on the back: each alien faction gets a significant bit of story, so if you like lore, here’s where it’s at. The game itself has very little in the way of a story: what you see in the image above is all of the flavor text from the rulebook before it dives into the game rules: “Billions of years in the future, when most of the stars have died, only rare white dwarfs remain—the last light in the universe.”
The board is a clever construction: there’s a square base, then a large disk and a smaller disk stacked together, with the white dwarf star’s support post serving as a central axis. During the course of the game, the smaller disk will rotate 90 degrees (relative to the larger disk) and then the large disk rotates 45 degrees (relative to the base board). The effect is that the planets closest to the sun will orbit very quickly, and the planets farther out rotate more slowly, and then any planets on the base board don’t move. (If it bothers you that the distant planets don’t move, just remember that everything is relative and that the entire board is rotating in space as well but your seat is orbiting at the same rate. The bigger coincidence is the number of planets that have the same orbit.) Both disks are double-sided with a different number of divisions—you’ll use a combination of the two based on the player count.
The cards come in a few sizes: player action cards and the graveyard cards are standard sized; planetary achievement cards and tech cards are small; the alien factions and the reference cards are large. While the board itself isn’t enormous, the whole game—with everyone’s player boards, cards, and supply of ships and extractors—tends to sprawl a bit, so you’ll need a big table if you want to max out the player count with the expansion. I managed to fit a six-player game on my table and it got a little bit messy but it worked. The first player token, a cardboard disc that looks like the cover image, is coaster-sized and kind of absurdly oversized.
Components-wise, this is a game that is definitely eye-catching, particularly with the deluxe edition. The colorful planets hovering over the board and rotating around the star are something you don’t see in most games and is the closest thing I’ve seen to an orrery in a board game, and it’s cool that even the retail edition has those. The deluxe board has some gloss patterns on the board, which is all black but shines when the light catches it. Add in all the colorful ships in the dark void and it really pops.
The catch is that it’s a lot of plastic. Ever since learning that UV gloss is just a layer of plastic applied to the cardboard, my enthusiasm for extra UV gloss has dampened a little. I have to admit that it still really looks cool when I see it on a box cover (or a book cover), and in Last Light, it livens up the otherwise all-black portions of the board. The plastic planets look great, and having different ship models from the other players is a nice touch, but ours is a hobby that feels like it has been shifting toward more and more plastic. The retail edition will still have plastic planets, but if you don’t mind cardboard tokens it will at least be a reduction.
How to Play Last Light
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to be the first player to collect 20 light.
Setup
The rulebook includes setup diagrams for each player count that tell you which sides of the rotating boards to use, and where to put things like planets, exploration tokens, and asteroids (which block off spaces that will not be used in the game). Set up supplies of all the resources, light tokens, damage tokens, and tech cards.
Take all of the components of your color (ships and extractors), along with a set of 6 action cards, 4 planetary achievement cards, a graveyard card, and a player board. Also, take 1 common resource. Each player will start with a colony ship (the round disk) on the board, a small ship in that sector, and an extractor on one of the common resources of their colony ship.
Before the game begins, each player chooses one planetary achievement card as a secret goal and sets it facedown, returning the rest to the box.
Gameplay
Most of the gameplay is simultaneous: every player chooses an action card from their hand, and they are all revealed at the same time. Except for the Command action, once action cards are revealed, everyone takes their action together. Action cards are left face-up after they’ve been played, so you will have fewer options until you refresh your hand.
The six actions are: Research, Mine, Construct, Trade, Refresh, and Command.
Research: get more technology. First, you score 1 point for every 4 tech cards that you have in play. Then, you draw 3 tech cards and keep 2 of them. Finally, you may pay to manufacture any number of tech cards that you can afford; the resource cost is shown on the card.
There are three types of tech cards: civilization cards (blue) are simply placed near your player board—some will be exhausted or even discarded when you use them, and some provide passive abilities. You may not have duplicate civilization tech cards. Ship ability (green) and ship mods (orange) are installed on your player board and affect your ships.
Your player board has three sections, one for each ship size, and ship upgrades affect all ships of that size. Each ship may have one ship ability—these are powerful abilities that often require a tech symbol to be rolled during an attack and sometimes require exhausting the ability card. Small ships can have 1 ship mod, medium ships can have 2 ship mods, and large ships can have 3 ship mods—ship mods do things like increase your speed, range, attack dice, or provide shields.
Mine: collect resources. For each extractor you have, collect the corresponding resource (or light point). Your colony ship can have up to 3 extractors, and each planet may have 1 extractor total.
Construct: Build ships and extractors. First, you may build any number of ships that you can afford. The resource cost for the ships is shown on the player boards. If any of your ships are in an opponent’s graveyard, you may pay them the resources to build a ship from there.
Then, you may build 1 extractor for free. An extractor may be placed on your colony ship, or on a planet if (1) there is no extractor there already and (2) your ships are the only one present at that planet.
Building an extractor gives you control of a planet, which could count toward your secret planetary achievement card. If you reach your goal, reveal your card and gain the light indicated. (If you lose control later, you do not lose the achievement.)
Trade: You may take two trade actions from the following:
- Gain 1 common resource
- Trade 2 common resources for 1 uncommon resource (or vice versa)
- Trade 2 uncommon resources for 1 rare resource (or vice versa)
- Trade 2 rare resources for 1 light (cannot trade back)
You may take the same action twice. After you trade, you must choose one opponent to gain a common resource.
Refresh: Pick up all of your other action cards, leaving your Refresh card on the table. Unexhaust any of your exhausted cards, and remove any damage from all of your ships. You also collect light points from your extractors: 2 points for each extractor on the inner disk and 1 point for each extractor on the outer disk. (Extractors on distant planets—on the square board—do not provide any light points during Refresh.)
Refresh may also trigger the end of the round—if all players have played their Refresh card, a few things happen:
- Everyone picks up their Refresh card and puts it back in their hand.
- Every player who has ships in the very center (with the white dwarf star) collects 1 light per ship.
- Rotate the boards—the inner ring rotates 90 degrees and the outer ring rotates 45 degrees. (There are some icons on the edges, so you just rotate until the icons line up.)
- Pass the first player marker clockwise.
- If anyone has 20 or more light, the game ends.
Command: move your ships and attack. The Command action is the lengthiest step and the only one that must be done in player order if multiple players played Command in the same turn. First, in turn order, every player who played Command will move their ships. Typically ships move 1 space, but ship mods can increase this.
If you’re the first to reach a planet or a space with an exploration token in it, you get to reveal it. Some have one-time bonuses.
Then, every player who played Command may attack with all of their ships, even the ones that did not move.
To attack, you pick a target and roll dice. Without mods, each ship may only shoot in its own space and will roll 1, 2, or 3 dice depending on the ship size. Several faces have a starburst that does 1 damage; in addition, there’s a damage that lets you roll another die and add it to your results. If you have a tech symbol, it means you may activate the tech on that ship.
Ships can take 1, 2, or 3 damage depending on their size–place damage tokens under the ships to mark the damage, but do not remove any destroyed ships yet. All players who played Command will get a chance to attack, even if their ships would be destroyed; thematically, everyone shoots at the same time. Then, after everyone has shot, remove the ships you destroyed and put them onto your graveyard card. You can use the reminder tokens to mark locations where combat has been resolved since it can get especially confusing if several players have played Command in the same turn.
You may also bombard enemy extractors, but there are some restrictions: only the large ships can bombard the extractors, and you may only do so if there are none of that player’s ships in the sector at the start of the attack. Extractors only take 1 hit to destroy.
Game End
You check for the game end at the end of a round, when everyone has played their Refresh card. If anyone has at least 20 light, the game ends, and whoever has the most light wins the game. Ties are broken by the most technology cards, and then the most resources.
Last Light is GeekDad Approved!
Why You Should Play Last Light
Last Light is 4X game, a genre named after four Xs: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Generally, these types of games include exploration on a map of some sort, increasing your population (or army, or fleet, etc.), building up your technology and abilities, and attacking other players. It’s a genre that often results in huge, time-consuming games (see Twilight Imperium) though there are, of course, exceptions (such as Tiny Epic Kingdoms).
One of Last Light‘s selling points was a deep 4X experience in a fraction of the time (I’ve seen ads that claim it’s under an hour), so I was very curious to see whether that was the case. The way that it’s accomplished is through the simultaneous play: for the majority of the actions that players can choose, everything happens at the same time. You don’t need to wait for me to finish my research action for you to complete your mining, and the next player can be constructing at the same time. The only turn-based portion where you’ll have to wait your turn is during the command action when players are moving ships around and attacking.
In practice, there are a few other places where you might be sitting and waiting: first, some players may just take longer choosing an action. Sure, once you select mining then it’s a simple matter of counting up your extractors and taking resources from the supply, but if it takes you five minutes to decide to mine, some of the other players may be sitting and waiting for those five minutes. The research action is another that often slowed down our games: since you draw 3 tech cards and choose 2 to keep, sometimes that was a tough decision and everyone was done with their turns while one player was still looking at their tech cards. (And then they still needed to decide which ones to build!)
While command is only one of six options, the more players you have, the more often somebody will be doing it, so while the game length doesn’t balloon with more players the way it does in some games, adding more players does stretch the time you’ll be sitting at the table. Our 6-player game (the largest group I played with) lasted about 3 hours, and that was a learning game where at least four of the players were playing for the first time. So it’s still a hefty game, but it’s also a fraction of Twilight Imperium.
I mention that Twilight Imperium in particular because it does feel like Last Light sits in a very similar space. I haven’t ever played it myself, alas—I hope to one day!—but several people in my gaming group had, and they all agreed that Last Light has some of the same flavor but trimmed down. I don’t think it will unseat Twilight Imperium as The Big 4X Space Game, but it seems like it would make for a good alternate when you don’t have six or eight hours to devote to one game. Another bonus: you can play Last Light with just 2 players, and it’s a pretty speedy game at that player count.
There are some fiddly parts of the game, like balancing the exploration tokens on the planet bases, but for the most part, I did find it to be nicely streamlined, and the actions are all generally very easy to understand. I’ve been able to teach the game several times to different player groups, and it has been well-received and players have picked up on it pretty easily. I think that’s one of the strengths of Last Light—that the individual actions are simple, and the complexity of the game arises from the way they interact. In that sense, it reminds me a little of Mosaic, a civilization game that is big and sprawling but manages not to overwhelm you with rules.
When the game begins, everyone starts with approximately the same thing other than your faction ability: you can probably reach a planet if you explore on your first turn, or maybe you want to research first in the hopes of upgrading your ships before you send them out. As the game progresses, though, the various technologies that players have installed on their ships or for their civilizations will diverge even more. One player has faster ships that are harder to damage; another one has longer range and can shoot from afar; a third player can harvest extra light once per round. As with other 4X games, a lot of the appeal comes in the various different approaches that are possible, and trying to build a strategy that will work: success will depend on figuring out what other players are going to do, and also a bit of luck in finding technologies that work well together.
Last Light allows players to lean into different tactics, often driven in part by the alien factions you’re playing, which will give you an edge in one area or another. One faction can make better use of technology, so that player will likely be researching often. Another has an ability that triggers when they damage a ship—so you know they’re probably going to be pretty aggressive as soon as they can get some ships built. I’ve seen players win by holing up and just focusing on developing their own small corner of the solar system, and I’ve seen others win through combative expansion and conquest.
The rotating board might seem a little gimmicky, but I really liked the way that planets will shift in and out of your reach. The inner planets especially rotate very quickly, which often surprises players a bit the first time it happens. The sooner you can get some ships out onto the rotating disks, the more easily you’ll be able to spread your influence farther afield—assuming those ships don’t get destroyed! And since the rotation happens only when everyone has played their Refresh card, you can try to predict when it’s going to happen, and when it’s worth parking some ships in the center to harvest some more light when that happens.
Ultimately, I think Last Light lives up to its promise: it’s an exciting, dynamic 4X game that plays (relatively) quickly but still incorporates many of the features you’d want in a much longer game. It has a great table presence, is easy to learn, and the various alien factions will give you a lot of room to explore. (And, you know, expand, exploit, and exterminate.)
For more information, visit the Grey Fox Games website—your best opportunity to get a copy may be the upcoming Gamefound campaign in January.
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Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a copy of this game for review purposes.
