No, this isn't a pandemic-themed game, nor a timely tie-in with the Passover story of the Israelites escape from captivity in Egypt. In Space Plague, it's the 1-4 players who are the 'plagues': space-going races who are, in effect, colonising an alien world. You'll be racing to get tokens representing your species out onto your player board and along a path to reach the planet's core, which is where you'll score at the end of the game (when the planet event deck runs out). Along the way, you'll be collecting energy which you can use to fund evolutionary upgrades to your species.
Designers Juan Alvarez and Ivan Botero have come up with an elegant design in a light very playable game, enriched with Ivan's cute cartoon art, which appropriately conveys the light-hearted theme. Players each have a hand of six action cards - the same for each player. Three of the cards let you place out species tokens, two of them allow you to advance your tokens and one gives you the option to buy one of the evolution cards in the market display or to roll a die to try to get more energy. Evolution cards may have an immediate one-off (play and discard) effect, including potentially a 'take that' effect on another player; or they may go to your player board as a permanent species upgrade effect; or they may be cards that go into your hand - adding to and modifying your individual action card deck.
The cards turned over in the planet events deck have the immediate effect of seeding energy at specific locations on the track but they also indicate a negative effect that will happen two turns in the future when the card has advanced along its own track. Typically, this will involve killing off any species tokens at specific locations - so you'll need to use the advance information to avoid being at the wrong place at the wrong time! Note that species tokens all advance one step at the end of a turn, so you'll need also to take that into account.
Space Plague is being published by Bamboo Studio in Colombia. The game shown here on Board's Eye View is a prototype released ahead of the game's crowdfunding campaign launch on 8 April. We've had great fun with this family-friendly game and we're looking forward to seeing how the game develops over the course of its Kickstarter run. We'll add a link to the campaign when it goes live.