D’Tela Wins Inaugural Space Station Phoenix Plaque!

2023 marked the inaugural tournament for Gabriel Cohn’s new game: Space Station Phoenix. It is an incredible game with a mechanic that at least this GM had never seen before. A worker placement game where you disassemble your own action spaces in order to advance the game and score end game points.

Unfortunately, only 17 players were brave enough to venture into this game with only 7 tables through the Heats. It isn’t a big enough sample size to make any conclusions based off of the selections, but we will present the data that we can. In the Heats we allowed the players a selection of 2 basic hubs and their choices were interesting:

• Hubs B-7 and B-8 were never chosen
• Hubs B-4 and B-10 were the most commonly chosen and also the most successful
• Hub B-1 was the only hub chosen multiple times that never won

Other interesting data points from the Heats (only 6 games recorded a full scoresheet):

• Games split 3-3 on whether they ended with 9 sectors or 40 points
• The person with the most residents won all 6 games
• The player who triggered game end only won 2 of the 6 games

We had 6 unique winners through the 7 heat games with Brandon Buchanan being the only player to win twice. That setup gave us two 3-player Semifinal games, each advancing the top 2 players to a 4-player Final.

Semifinal 1

This Semifinal saw the GM take on the double winner Brandon in addition to well known gamer Sceadeau D’Tela. In the Semifinal and Final rounds, a choice between 1 basic and 1 advanced hub was offered and both Andrew and Sceadeau went for basic hubs (B-2 and B-11) while Brandon ventured out into the advanced hubs and played A-11.

Sceadeau very quickly dominated this game and had built his 9th sector before either Andrew or Brandon had gotten their engines really going. The race for 2nd was incredibly close with Brandon edging out Andrew 115-113 while Sceadeau ran away with 165.

Semifinal 2

The second Semifinal saw three seasoned WBC gamers go at it with Rich Shay, Sky Roy, and Curt Collins. Rich stayed with a basic hub having been given the option of the Heat winning B-10, but Sky and Curt both took advanced hubs to start (A-7 and A-3) Similar to the first Semifinal, this was not a close game. Sky used his points for diplomacy on top of his bonus for diplomacy to quickly blow away his opponents. Curt was able to hold off Rich to claim the last spot in the Final in a 180-134-124 game. After the game, the prevailing opinion was that station A-7 was overpowered and should be nerfed at some point.

Final

There was much consternation at the table in the Final when Sceadeau drew station A-7 and flopped it on the table, however, from early on, Brandon thought he had a decent plan to fight it. On his first turn Brandon scrapped his diplomacy ship, depriving Sceadeau of much of his abilities’ power. But Curt decide not to follow first turn and Sky never scrapped his, so Sceadeau used his power relentlessly.

Beyond using his diplomacy mastery, Sceadeau also took an interesting tactic of maximizing points at every opportunity and forcing game end as early as possible. He ran his engine as quickly as possible and focused on only one colour of alien to ensure some plurality points.

Sky had taken hub B-4 and focused on getting his humans out. Brandon similarly had B-11 and got a plurality in pinks easily. Curt was not as fortunate. He took hub A-1 which has powerful end game points to score, but only if there is enough time in the game to blow up all his ships. With Sceadeau driving end game so quickly, Curt never had a chance to develop his board.

So, when all the scoring was counted, Sceadeau emerged with a victory and the first ever WBC championship for Space Station Phoenix. Congratulations to him, and if we return this event in 2024, we will look to control some of the more powerful advanced hubs.

Final scores:

• Sceadeau: 41 points on board + 24 points for sectors + 14 for residents + 19 for pluralities + 2 for resources for a total of 100 points
• Brandon: 10 points on board + 24 points for sectors + 26 for residents + 20 for pluralities + 8 on station points + 1 for resources for a total of 89 points
• Sky: 10 points on board + 20 points for sectors + 24 for residents + 15 for pluralities + 18 on station points + 1 for resources for a total of 88 points
• Curt: 6 points on board + 24 points for sectors + 18 for residents + 14 for pluralities + 1 for resources for a total of 63 points