Sidereal Confluence Board Game Review

Year Published: 2017

Players: 4-9

Playing Time: 120-180 Minutes

Some reviewers will frame games as mere playthings. Others will look at the mechanical precedents in them and trace their lineage. Others still may look at ludo narratives and historical significance.

These are all valid approaches. For the right games, I enjoy them all.

Increasingly, though, I’m finding that I’m drawn to games that have something to show us about individual human interactions. The type of interactions that you can only get in certain types of games, such as bluffing, trading, negotiation, deception, collusion, extortion, party games, and so on. Some are “positive” (e.g. mutually beneficial trades) even in competitive environments, while others are more exploitative. But they’re the types of interactions many of us don’t have in day-to-day life, but can reveal aspects of our personalities and reveal emergent meta-narratives that involve the social dynamics of a situation.

Execution still matters, of course. These genres have their duds, like any other. But they’re always fascinating to me.

Sidereal Confluence is probably the most intricate social experiment ever set to cardboard. It has a lot to say about how we interact with one another. As a result, it’s capable of some of the highest social highs I’ve ever experienced in board gaming.

The cost is the occasionally intimidating structure of it all, which we’ll get into. But that structure is in service of a larger, transcendent whole that exemplifies the statement “more than the sum of its parts” better than any other game I could name.

Sidereal Confluence – A Summary

You are one of several alien races all working together in a shared galactic society, and the goal is to create a harmonious galaxy for all. But (of course) you’d also prefer if your species’ cultural habits were dominant in this new galactic civilization.

The game is a trading game. There are several types of resources that will power converters, which will take an input of resources and output something that’s worth more in the game’s economy.

Special converters will grant victory points and invent new technologies (more converters) that are first available to whoever invented it, but shortly thereafter available to all players (this is a sharing economy, after all). These techs present new opportunities to create a more robust economy, and can also be used to upgrade existing converters to more powerful ones.

Planet (colony) cards act as simplistic converters as well, giving you either a new resource to use toward upgrades (removing the colony card) or gaining resources in each of the game’s six rounds.

Each alien has various characteristics unique only to them, such as powerful resource types, unique converters, or minor abilities.

The heart of the game is the simultaneous trading phase, where very little is off-limits, and complicated and/or multi-player deals can be negotiated.

Coopetition…or Competiation…or pick your Awkward Portmanteau. Regardless, you’re competing with one another, but through collaboration.

Sidereal is a competitive game, but in an amusing paradox, it’s usually the player who cooperates with others the most who will win the game. Each resource’s value is relative to the situation, but in general it’s easy to know what a “fair” trade looks like.

So rather than trying to confuse others into making bad trades, you’re actually incentivized to simply make many equitable trades. But if you’re doing this enough, at the right times and with enough players, you’ll come out ahead in the aggregate.

This creates unique situations where, for example, my converters produce tons of green cubes (they have thematic names outside their colors but you’ll never use them), and another player needs lots of greens to run their own converters. Well ok then, hello new friend, let’s see what we can do here to our mutual benefit.

I have even taken to trying to curry some extra goodwill here and there. “Oh, I’m good this round,” I might say, “just go ahead and take this green to use and give me some cube next round, your choice.”

Unsurprisingly, I tend to do fairly well in the game overall with such methods. For a competitive game, this will seem strange, but the game’s dizzyingly fluid economy allows for it.

The game is symbiotic in this sense, because you’ll never have or produce what you need to do much of anything. Cooperation is a necessity. Even in some excellent free-for-all trading games, like Chinatown, you might simply be dealt the stuff you need, and the negotiations are for others to close that luck gap. But you’ll have no such luxury in Sidereal.

Factions and the Nature of the Negotiation

This isn’t the end of things, though, because each faction feels like an honest-to-goodness alien in the sense that it is deeply strange in some way. Yes, the underlying gameplay is the same, but playing as each faction doesn’t feel the same.

The very nature of the interactions you have will need to shift depending on faction. Your personality at the table, and the way others perceive you, will also shift. This is the truly fascinating part.

The Eni Et, for example, have some of the most powerful converters in the game…that they can’t use themselves. So they have to lease out the converters, likely for some cut of the benefits. With them, your job is to sell players on the long-term benefits of working together to make massive piles of a particular resource (which are useful for the most expensive, and highest victory point generating, technologies). But you’re competing with players’ existing converters.

The Yengii are the only race that doesn’t share technologies, but you can then sell them to others. Being able to survey the game state and leverage it into sales is key. It also incentivizes inventing numerous cheap technologies, rather than fewer large ones, to give you more to bargain with.

The Caylion have more productive and more numerous planets in most games, while other factions often need to spend planets to perform special actions. Picking the right moments to bargain with these natural allies is key.

The Im’Dril have the most powerful economy in the game…which also takes the longest to bring online fully. It’s often recommended that you go into debt to opponents early on in order to get your engine rumbling downhill quickly. But this will require convincing them…

And so on.

The confluence of player personalities and faction personalities in a session is stunning, because it produces different types of experiences within the same structure.

It also demands different skills from you. It’s no stretch to say that each player probably has their “ideal” faction for how they tend to play trading games, but I often find it more interesting simply to shift through the faction options and see what new directions it takes me.

There aren’t many games where the variable player powers change the game so profoundly. Dune comes to mind as perhaps the only better example of this. With most, however, it’s minor adjustments at best, rather than creating noticeably different social experiences.

Components, Rules Density and Information Overload

The game is sprawling and intimidating to many. Some pictures of sessions with 7-9 players look like the board game equivalent of an infected computer that has dozens of malware-induced icons on its desktop. Cards representing converters, techs and colonies are splayed everywhere. And the information they represent can quickly overwhelm anyone if they’re not careful.

This is a feature of the game, not a bug, but it will turn some off. It’s a feature, though, because in creating a more complex economic ecosystem than any single player can track, it makes it nigh-impossible to identify or begin to target a leader. The interaction remains helpful and positive throughout, because it’s impossible to parse the game state at the level that would demand otherwise.

So you need to be paying attention to and interacting with everyone, but simultaneously have to tune out anything that isn’t related to your particular goals. What three-person deal is happening at the other end of the table? Who cares, do you need this colony or not? I need a barrel for it or no deal.

And because eventually every trade that will happen in a round will be complete, you’re also on an invisible timer to get what you need before everyone else trades for what they need without you. There’s an implied momentum to the game as a result, but also a bit of pressure. The game length can still be considerable (the game says 2-3 hours, but the latter of those is closer to the truth in most of my sessions), but it rarely, if ever, stalls out for lack of activity.

It’s also resulted in some truly wonderful social moments for me, like making a deal for which I have none of the resources, then brokering 2-3 deals elsewhere merely to get the resources for the initial deal.

Or selling the same technology to six different people in a round with the Yengii, all for different reasons, which became the cornerstone of my eventual juggernaut of an economy.

The first time I played this, the heady, constant interpersonal buzz was so profound that, when the game ended, I realized that my adrenaline had spiked and could feel my mind “buzzing” subtly. 20-30 minutes after the session, I could feel the rush wear off, and I was noticeably more tired. My brain literally slowed down and I had a hard time playing the next game of the night.

Walk that back a second: a board game created a visceral physical reaction in me due to how alive my mind was during it. That is a statement I can’t make about any other board game, ever.

So is this game exhausting in numerous ways? Yes, 1000%. But that’s also going to be one of the main appeals.

Sidereal Confluence – Conclusions

The fact that the game is apparently quite balanced with equal play between factions is a minor miracle to me. Given all the moving parts, I can’t fathom the design achievement this represents.

Sidereal Confluence is the “most” of its type of trading gameplay you’re ever going to need. That same excess will be an instant turn-off for those who don’t enjoy the core gameplay, but it will mean that those who do may just have found their favorite game.