This week, there were just five of us and I had just received my subscription copies of Martin Wallace's latest two games, so Onward to Venus was an obvious choice. This is an area control game played over three rounds but each round has a plethora of action options and there are likely to be several turns each player is going to want to take to improve their position. These actions involve building military units, moving them between planets, using the units to claim strategic targets that are located on the planets, while also guarding against opponents attacking you as tension builds up. This tension aspect is slightly odd in a game of competition for controlling areas, as you can only attack an opponent's mine or factory if there is a tension token present and once the tension token(s) are removed, no more conflict can take place so opportunities for revenge / reclaiming a lost asset are limited or non-existent. In addition, crises potentially appear at the end of each round and if these escalate, they can have very serious consequences. At the end of the game, players score points for their influence on each planet and any crisis, big game or alien tiles they gained during the game.

In our game, Mars was the troublesome planet with two tension tiles on it from the start and I felt very nervous, having been first to settle there, when warmonger Mark G decided he wanted a factory there. And sure enough, he did eventually revert to natural instincts and pinched one of my mines. Guy sped off to the far reaches of the solar system and concentrated on Titan and the Kuiper Belt. Nige went the other way and dominated Mercury and Venus (although tied with Guy there). Mark K went for collecting cards - a pretty normal strategy for him - but he forgot about needing to actually try and settle planets. The game took us 2 hours 40 minutes to complete, which was a bit on the long side but kept us all pretty engaged throughout (maybe downtime between turns with five players could be an issue though). When the dust settled, no-one was surprised to find Nige had won, picking up first or second place on four planets. The crises didn't really affect matters as they might have but I learned afterwards that we'd not resolved them quite right. Good game that I'd like to try again with three or four players, especially as the random nature of the tiles drawn at the start of each round should make each game different.