Since its discovery in 1801, the status of Ceres as a celestial body has changed several times. It is now mostly regarded as a dwarf planet but it remains an especially interesting body within our solar system because NASA's robotic Dawn mission confirmed its surface comprises frozen water, carbonates and clay. Combined with Ceres' known volcanic activity, this makes it one of the solar system's prime candidates for having developed microbial life. Ceres then is the setting for Artipia's worker placement eurogame where the 1-4 players are corporate developers gaining resources at their space station and through mining operations in the neighbouring asteroid belt, and earning victory points by using the resources to upgrade the space station and the effectiveness of their actions, develop settlements on Ceres, and to trade.
Designed by Gustaf Sundstrom, with art from Gerasimos Mekerides and Tan Ho Sim, the game is played over three rounds and one of the features that is especially striking is that the dwarf planet's astronomical position in relation to the asteroids changes each round. This is represented by rotating the outer, intermediate and inner rings of the asteroid belt. This makes the board altogether more dynamic - reminding us of the moving asteroids that were the standout feature of TSR's unofficial Risk variant Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century.
Players have five leader tokens that are placed out at various locations to take the indicated actions, including to exercise Influence at the Asteroid Mining Assembly of Corporations (AMAC) Council and to recruit additional workers to be allocated to activate specific colour cards in your space station. You usually have to pay up front the resource costs of actions but you have the option of taking a settlement project that you cannot currently pay for. This can be a push-your-luck decision because if you haven't covered the project card's costs by the end of the game then you'll be hit with a hefty points penalty.
Ceres is a mediumweight, worker placement, engine building game. Tho' you're playing on a busy board, the iconography is clear and this isn't a difficult game to pick up. You'll find the game has a distinct arc over its three rounds, with competition particularly stepping up for the extra workers of specific colours. There are tough decisions to take about optimising the order in which you take your actions. You may well want to upgrade a card in your space station to maximise the impact of placing one of the extra workers there but you run the risk of that extra worker being taken by another player before your next turn. Turn order can be important, not so much for being frozen out of a location - in our plays at Board's Eye View we usually found there were adequate spots at the various locations - but because there are bonuses to be had for being the first to get to the end of the short research tracks used to upgrade core actions and because Settlement Project cards on the board aren't replaced when they're taken. And just be warned, with just three rounds there's an urgency to getting your engine working: new players can forget this and find they have built upgrades that they barely get to benefit from before the game ends. It's some consolation tho' that all the upgrades you make and extra cards you add to your space station do at least give you some victory points even if you never get a chance to make full use of them.
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