Entropy: the space euro where moving little pays and costs

Three Italian authors, with Barrage, Newton, and Darwin's Journey under their belts, have teamed up for the first time, and the result is a game where no one ever touches you. There are rumors of advanced civilizations colonizing the cosmos, as announced in January, but the finished rulebook tells a much smaller story.

An exam, in a room, with a simulator

Entropy, in physics, is the tendency of everything to spontaneously disorder. Heat dissipates, stars die out, and none of it ever reverses. In the game world, humanity has learned to bend it, and entropy has become a fuel—a red cube you spend to make things work. You are an apprentice scientist taking your final exam, locked in a room with a simulator.

In front of you is your player board, which the game calls the Console, and around the main board runs a ring of twelve action spaces. Each turn, you move your Scientist, your only pawn, one to three spaces clockwise. The six inner spaces repeat the three major actions in pairs, and to take one, you place a Creation disc there. Discs are not currency and are not spent, because there are four of them—one for each major action plus a wild card—and they remain where you left them until you pass over them again to retrieve them. Without the right disc in hand, that action is unavailable.

Before starting, you also take three Focus cards, one for each major action. Initially, they do nothing. They tell you which powers you can unlock, and each time you spend a turn upgrading the Console, you level one up. From then on, that action gives you something extra every time you use it.

With the major actions, you build solar systems, and each holds a star and two planets, with up to two asteroids and one biome per planet. Stars are not just decoration, because each star is a machine that transforms entropy into energy, mass, or life forms, and the most evolved ones directly transform it into points. You place life on the planets by playing cards, but only if the star, planet, and asteroids together show the icons required by the card. The player with the most points wins, and only two out of six objectives need to be completed for the countdown to begin. What is not there can be quickly stated: no one blocks a space, no one steals a card from your hand, and there is no map to explore.

How much each step costs you

The schema above describes a clean turn and hides the question the game asks you every round. The reward is greater the fewer steps you take, because with one step you get the full reward, and with three, you get nothing. However, moving quickly serves two purposes. It brings your discs back into your hand, without which the three major actions remain closed, and it lets you collect what is underneath each of them.

And this is where the game distinguishes itself from its counterparts. Each disc you retrieve allows you to ignite a star, meaning you spend some entropy to produce energy, mass, life forms, or raw points. Then, each retrieved disc counts separately, so if you retrieve two and also land on the star action, the same star can activate three times in the same turn. A short move gives you fuel; a long move burns it all at once.

What complicates matters is who is around you, because landing where another Scientist already is counts as an extra step and eats into your reward. How often this happens depends on the setup, with a detail that is barely noticeable.

Three signatures, and five names below

Tommaso Battista is from Rome, an architecture graduate, and spent years in the construction sector. That's where Barrage arose from the tender processes he observed firsthand. Nestore Mangone has his own gameography, having co-written Shackleton Base with Fabio Lopiano. Simone Luciani signed Tzolk'in, Marco Polo, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Barrage.

Beneath the three big names, however, the credits list five others for development, which is why the Signature doesn't go higher. The illustrations are by three people, Piotr Orleański, Sławomir Rybka, and Mikołaj Lasota, and the graphic design is by Zbigniew Umgelter. The BGG page lists two.

What's inside for sixty euros

Two hundred wooden pieces for 59.99 euros is a lot, and in the same price range, you can find boxes with much less inside. There are one hundred and forty shaped life forms including bacteria, plants, and animals, plus sixty resources, and on top of that, fifty-five star tiles, forty-four planets, forty asteroids, and thirty-six biomes.

The savings are noticeable elsewhere. The six external action tiles rest on the board without interlocking, so they slide around while you play, and the biome tiles are twice as large as they need to be because almost their entire surface is artwork. There's no insert, and the bags inside aren't enough to separate everything, so much so that those who already own the box say that setup and put-away is the worst part of the evening.

If the box is heavy, who do you play against alone?

That same box contains a second booklet, signed by Kacper Frydrykiewicz with Dávid Turczi, and it pits you against an automatic opponent that builds nothing. It's called Ghost, it's a pawn of a color no one uses, and its distance is the opposite of yours. If you move one step, it moves three; if you move three, it moves one. Every time it passes the Progress deck, you draw a card, which makes it advance on objectives and removes something from the market.

To win, you must score more points than it, but first, you must complete at least two of the three Challenges, otherwise the game is lost by default. The difficulty is adjusted by changing the value of its final objectives, from three to five times. What the Ghost doesn't do is build, as it has no planets, no stars, and doesn't play cards, so it remains more of a stopwatch you're racing against than an opponent that responds to you.