Scan the night skies with your telescope, discover new constellations, and pair them up to create myths.
What Is Starry Night Sky?
Starry Night Sky is a constellation-making game for 2 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 30–45 minutes to play. It retails for $29.99 and is available in stores or from the Buffalo Games store on Amazon (they don’t appear to have it in their own web store yet).
Starry Night Sky was designed by Emma Larkins and published by Buffalo Games, with art by Nim Ben Reuven.
Starry Night Sky components. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Starry Night Sky Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
— 4 Player boards
— Game board
— 150 Stars (50 each in red, blue, yellow)
— Cloth bag
— 4 Telescope pawns
— 4 Scoring tokens
— Starting Player token
— 24 Discovery tokens
— 36 Exploration Goal cards
— 16 Myth cards
— 2 Reference cards
Telescope pawns. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The plastic telescope pawns are simple, but cute. Since they use the common red-green-blue-yellow set for the pawns, scoring markers, and player boards, there might be some difficulty for color-blind players — check the photos here to see if you have any issues telling any of the components apart.
Sparkly stars. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The stars are a translucent plastic, giving them a nice sparkle. They’re small but not so small that they’re hard to handle, and by the end of the game the main board will be covered with them.
The exploration goal cards are round, which I’m not generally a fan of because they’re not as easy to shuffle, but there aren’t too many of them. The myth cards are standard rectangular cards.
By the end of the game, the board is covered with colorful stars. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The board shows a circular map of new constellations with fun names like Evocative Performer and Suspicious Mushroom. They remind me of those auto-generated usernames for kids’ apps where you can’t use real names. Each one is accompanied by an illustration, with 2 to 4 stars that make up the constellation. (As with real constellations, sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch to see how those particular stars made that shape.) There’s a night track across the top and a scoring track at the bottom. My only complaint about the board is that the spaces get crowded — if you put a few stars, a discovery token, and one telescope in a space, it can be hard to see which stars are still needed, or one of the components might cover up a path leading away from it.
The shiny box cover and the box insert. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The box cover is particularly sparkly, with some iridescent gold foil that is really eye-catching. The board itself doesn’t have the gold foil so it’s not as sparkly, but it’s still pretty nice. The plastic insert inside does the job but is a little odd: there’s one well that just held the cardboard for punching out the tokens and is kind of useless once you’ve done that, but the box size is largely determined by the folded board so it couldn’t be much smaller, just perhaps a bit shallower but that makes for strange proportions.
How to Play Starry Night Sky
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points by discovering new constellations, adding stars to constellations, and completing your myth cards.
Starry Night Sky 4-player setup. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Setup
Place the main board in the center, with the player telescopes in the “Start” space in the center. Place scoring tokens near the score track at the bottom. Fill the night track at the top of the board with discovery tokens (up to the player count). Shuffle the exploration goal cards and place them nearby. Put the stars in the cloth bag and mix them up.
Give each player a player board and three myth cards, which are kept secret from other players. Each player draws 3 stars and places one in each star pool on their player board.
Choose a starting player and give them the starting player marker.
A few examples of exploration cards. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Gameplay
On your turn, you draw stars for your star pools, draw an exploration goal card, and then move your telescope to explore.
You draw one star from the bag for each star pool that isn’t full — each pool on your board can hold up to 4 stars. After drawing, assign one star to each pool that isn’t full already.
Then, draw an exploration card. Exploration goal cards will give you points for fulfilling particular requirements during your turn. You may also discard an exploration goal card to draw a star of your choice out of the bag. You have a hand limit of 3 exploration goal cards.
As the game progresses, discoveries are worth more and more points. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Finally, you must move your telescope to an adjacent constellation, following the paths that connect the telescopes. If you’re the first person to arrive at a constellation, then you have discovered it — take a discovery token from the night track and place it on the constellation, and then score points as shown on the night track. The later in the game, the more points discoveries are worth.
Yellow player has discovered the Vivid Orchid, and marks it with a discovery token. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
You must place at least one star onto the constellation you move to; if you place more than one star in a constellation, they must all come from the same star pool on your player board. (If you can’t place any stars in a constellation because you don’t have the matching colors, then you can’t move there.) You score one point for each star you place into a constellation.
Green placed the last required star on the Reliable Sailboat and flips over the discovery token to mark it as completed. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
If you place the last star into a constellation, then it is now fully mapped, and you flip the discovery token over to show that it has been completed. Note that you skip over any completed constellations when you move, stopping when you arrive at an incomplete constellation. Also, once you have left the Start space, you skip over it in future movements.
This player was able to move through three completed constellations in one move. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
If your first movement during a turn did not result in a new discovery, then you get one bonus exploration (but only one bonus per turn). You move your telescope again, potentially making a new discovery, and place at least 1 star in that constellation as before. (The stars you place in this second exploration can come from the same star pool as your first exploration, or from a different pool.)
This player ended with 2 stars in each star pool, fulfilling an exploration goal card for 2 points. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
If you met the requirements for an exploration goal card, discard the card and score the points shown at the bottom of the card.
Game End
When the last discovery token on the night track is taken, the end of the game is triggered. Finish the round so that all players have had the same total number of turns, using additional discovery tokens from the dawn track as needed.
Each myth card has two constellations, and is worth between 2 and 5 points. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
All players reveal their myth cards. If both constellations shown on a myth card are completed, then you score the points shown at the bottom (regardless whether you were the player who completed those constellations).
The highest score wins! If there’s a tie, it goes to the player who scored the most points from myth cards.
Why You Should Play Starry Night Sky
Looking for pictures in the stars and telling stories are both ancient pastimes, though it’s been a while since I’ve really made up my own constellations — it feels like everything has already been named and established. Starry Night Sky lets you explore a different set of stars, with constellations based on a whole new set of myths. Of course, writing those myths is left as an exercise to the players. What was the story of the Strong Thread and the Lost Scarf? Maybe you’ll be the first to tell it!
The gameplay is pretty straightforward — get points whenever you discover new constellations and when you add stars to the board, and work toward completing the constellations on your secret myth cards. Hitting your exploration goals can give you a few bonus points, but sometimes they’re impossible based on your current set of stars, or at other times they’ll work against your long-term goals.
One thing that can be tricky about the game is that it can end before you’re really ready. The end is triggered when all the discovery tokens on the night track have been claimed, and every player has the opportunity to claim one per turn. Every turn, if you don’t move to a new constellation for your first exploration, you get a bonus move. And since you can skip over completed constellations (and you get points for the discoveries), you’re incentivized to keep pushing out to the unexplored edges of the star field to get those extra points. While you could spend both moves filling in existing constellations, that usually doesn’t happen unless they happen to line up with your myth cards. It looks like a really long track at first, but those tokens vanish quickly!
Did you get all of your myths completed? Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The myth cards have a range of values, and they’re nicely balanced. The cards that are worth more points are just harder to complete, either because they require more stars or because the constellations involved are harder to reach. You may spend a lot of turns exploring just to get to one, and if nobody else is following you and filling in the constellations behind you, you’ll spend a lot of turns backtracking to reach the other. While it’s possible to score all three of your myth cards, I haven’t seen it done often (and it will likely be at the cost of getting points from discovery tokens each turn).
Of course, it’s also important to remember that you don’t have to personally complete the constellations on your myth cards — you’ll get points as long as they’ve been finished, even if somebody else placed most or all of the stars in it. It’s interesting that you don’t get any points when you finish a constellation, aside from the usual 1 point per star, so there’s no bonus incentive for finishing things off. But the exploration goals, like achievements in video games, may have you going out of your way so you can use particular stars from your star pools, and that can often result in filling in somebody else’s myth constellations.
Sometimes the odds will work against you and you won’t get the stars you want. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
It’s nice that the exploration goals can be traded for stars. Sometimes you get a goal that just doesn’t work for you. You can hang onto it for future turns, but if all of your myth constellations require red stars then you may not want to fulfill a goal that requires you place no red stars for a turn. And, of course, sometimes you get a string of unlikely draws and all of your stars are the same color! Ditch that impossible card and pick whatever star you want from the bag.
Starry Night Sky was designed by Emma Larkins, who previously made Abandon All Artichokes, our 2020 Game of the Year. Like Abandon All Artichokes, it is pretty light and family-friendly, but it has also appealed to many of my adult gaming friends. It’s not a brain-burner, but still gives you some choices to think about, and as a bonus it looks really lovely on the table. It can feel a little short, so it’s best for groups that want something that isn’t quite as time-consuming or mentally taxing.
To pick up a copy, ask at your local game store or visit the Buffalo Games Amazon storefront.
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
