Shackleton Base Board Game Review

Written by Dan York

Shackleton Base is a worker placement game with a lot of things going on.

Playing Shackleton Base

After drafting your starting resources, workers and turn order for the round, players take turns placing a worker onto the board to do one of many, many things.

Each worker is one of three colours, either an engineer, a scientist or a technician; any astronaut can do any kind of action, but sending the right worker to perform its specialisation offers you a much-needed bonus action to double-dip on what you can do each turn. Actions include visiting the crater for resources, building dwellings and labs to stake a claim to a board sector, funding project cards for bonus objectives or actions, or just taking the employ of a corporation. 

Getting resources means paying other players for the privilege of mining the sectors that they currently control so choosing when to do this, and exactly which parts of the board you choose to explore matters a lot. Buildings come in many types, each providing some kind of passive bonus or endgame scoring condition, they are placed directly onto the crater, freeing up space on your own personal board for astronauts to work there too. 

Corporation actions are the glue that holds Shackleton Base together. Mostly small in scope, you can spend your turn taking a handful of them, but exactly what actions are available depends on how you have set the game up. The box contains seven different corps, each with its own set of projects, resources and game boards.

Some corporations might have you performing scientific research to fuel increasingly complex experiments, placing greenhouses into the crater to advance crop research, setting up tourist hotspots to make the moon an appealing hotspot for other humans, or even detecting and (hopefully) neutralising an impending meteor threat. Many actions in the game are done in the service of picking up victory points, but the corporations themselves also have appealing contracts throughout the game which you can claim at any time, assuming someone else hasn’t already beaten you to it.

Related article: Looking to boldly go? Try Under Falling Skies, an epic solo game. 

This is a big box with a lot of content. The modular design of the corporations makes for a huge amount of variety each time you play. Firstly, I must commend the elegance with which the non-modular aspects of the game operate, you can sometimes go a few turns without needing to interact with the corporations and nothing has been sacrificed, with those still being interesting and fun game actions to take.

Every set-up we tried has played out very differently, some corporations (such as Space Robotics) provide an influx of resources into the pool, creating a high economy game state whereas others (for example, the Sky Watch) create an urgent funnel for all players to spend time and resources on, potentially neglecting other aspects of their strategy. Combining different boards leads to a range of diverse strategic landscapes.

Shackleton Base Review

My favourite corporation, EverGreen, sees players adding greenhouses to the board which both take up valuable real estate that could have been filled by player’s own buildings and adds extra tension to one of the otherwise mundane round clean-up steps. 

It’s very pleasing to take buildings from your player board and socket them onto spaces on the central crater. The lovely double-thick layer design of the personal boards means that taking the building action leaves behind an empty space which is waiting for you to find a way to bring an astronaut down from the Lunar Gateway into your permanent employment. Workers on your board represent them being on the surface of the moon, working in the labs, workshops or even headquarters that you have constructed.

This is easily my favourite part of the game, as not only do buildings give you something permanent to work toward, but the way the main board sectors are set up means that one player will always be the majority controller of them and be able to fleece the others for precious credits any time they go to collect resources. It’s like there’s a secret area control game sitting under the surface of this otherwise low-interaction Eurogame. 

Scoring some incidental victory points in Shackleton Base is pretty easy, but finding a route to clear victory through racking up a big score is far from obvious sometimes. The game has many layered systems, each of which require careful planning to interact with optimally, but the real joy comes in finding ways to use one system to bolster another. Every corporation offers “project” cards, these include granting passive benefits, improving your other actions or unlocking new actions that only you can take.

They’re alright on their own, but with smart use of your actions and resources, you can turn a project from one corporation, into a way to generate advantage that can be spent working for another corporation or getting buildings down much more efficiently. 

Shackleton Base has fairly low levels of player interaction, other than the aforementioned area control aspect to using the physical space on the crater, most interaction is in the form of taking things before someone else though this is not a huge part of the experience. For the majority of a round, you’ll likely not be restricted by your opponents too much, only towards round’s close might things get tight, so you need to be at least a little bit vigilant about what others are going to do next.

Learning to play this game was a bit of a slog, it’s great that there’s a lot going on, but it makes for a long-winded teaching experience. It’s the price one must pay for a game this dense with systems, but I would have appreciated if the iconography was a touch clearer, or in some cases, actually correct. By no means a deal-breaker, but a few production quirks could make this unapproachable for a less well-prepared first timer.

In short, big game, big fun, frankly. We had a blast playing through this multiple times, a different modular set up each time really adds to the sense of exploration and discovery as we tried to path out our strategies. The recommended play time on the box feels like an underestimate and I would caution that my first play took almost five hours, though I’ve got this shaved down to a reliable two to three hours now. It’s very much worth the time investment, however, there’s a lot to love about Shackleton Base which does enough to not just be another generic space Eurogame. 

From a table-space and time-commitment perspective, I don’t think I can guarantee getting this game to the table every week, but I don’t see it leaving my collection any time soon as it’s perfectly suited to be the centrepiece of a full games day anytime one comes up. 

Our Verdict

You should play this game.  It's a layered and interesting approach to a resources-matter eurogame. With 35 different setups, you’ll get your money’s worth!

You should absolutely try this if you liked Kutná Hora. Complex games, merging multiple different gameplay styles into a single elegant puzzle, Shackleton Base and Kutná Hora are trying to make eurogames cool again.

Designer: Fabio Lopiano, Nestore Mangone

Publisher: Sorry We Are French

Time: 1-2

Players: 2-4

Ages: 14+

Price: £65

What’s in the box?

• Main board
• 4 Player boards
• 116 Wooden pieces
• 77 Cards
• 436 Tokens and tiles
• 11 Storage boxes
• Rules booklet
• 7 Corporate sheets