As an avid fan of puzzles and video games that feature puzzle elements, the concept of The Stars Are Right really intrigued me. The game, like Elder Sign and Arkham Horror before it, is set with a tongue in cheek version of the Cthulhu mythos, as drawn by the very cutesy talents of Goomi. The Cthulhu aspect of the game is just window dressing, though. At its heart, Stars is an interesting sort of pattern matching chess game between you and one to three other friends, where you are trying to chain together commands to make the board fit your specific needs.
Part card combo game, and part moveable jigsaw puzzle, The Stars Are Right is an interesting new dynamic for a game, and really deserves a few playthroughs for anyone who likes trying a little logic puzzle mixed in their game.
How To Play The Stars Are Right
The object is for each player to accumulate ten points of evil Cthulu-ish disciples first. There are a whole slew available to you in the game, with various factions and abilities, so it isn’t hard to build a nice group of three or four, but that is when the game starts to get really interesting.
First, how do you summon these little guys to do your horrible evil bidding? On the board is a grid of squares that each have a symbol. This whole board represents the current state of the sky, but it will be changing drastically as the game continues. Make sure to keep a little bit of room around each tile, because they all have symbols on their other side as well. From simple star arrangements, to moons in various phases, this is a busy sky that is going to start flipping, shifting, and switching on every single turn.
The players are dealt five cards each, and on each card is one of the Elder God minions, and a few Elder Gods thrown into the mix. On their card, they tell you how many points they offer you if you summon them, what they do if they are played, and what they do if you summon them. On your turn you may play one of the cards from your hand, which will give you the chance to slide, flip, or switch any of the tiles on the board.
The intent of that is to get the stars correct so the pattern on one of the other cards in your hand is perfect and you may immediately bring them into play. You now have their permanent ability at your beck and call to be used once a turn. A simple minion might let you take a flip and turn it into a switch. So that means if you play a switch card, you now have access to a flip as well. The greater the summon card, the greater the powers, so you might have an elder that changes one slide into two flips. Now you have TWO moves to use, that can also be modified through other minions. (Taking one of those flips and turning into a slide, perhaps.)
The moves, flips, slides, etc become second nature as you go along. A slide is taking an entire row or column of tiles and moving them in one direction, putting the one that “falls off the edge” on the other side. A flip means literally flipping the card to show the star pattern on its other side. A switch is taking two tiles and switching their location. In a two player game, you can start to concoct moves a turn or two ahead, but the more players you add, the harder it becomes, as by the time the board gets back to you, it is an entirely different sky.
The Stars Are Right Strategy
As I’ve mentioned, the more players you add, the harder it is going to be. That is one of the most fun and frustrating parts of the whole experience. If you get ahead of the game with a nice selection of minions, you have a lot more control than the person still fighting to get a simple pattern together. As everyone starts to collect some of the more complex moves, you are going to find that it takes a little bit longer to come around to your turn, and the sky that you are left with looks absolutely nothing like what you were working on prior.
That’s where summoning sets comes into play. Each of the smaller minions has a symbol on their card and with which Elder they align with. The more of the same aligned minions you have, the easier it is going to be to summon the elder, as you can ‘subtract’ that symbol from the Elder’s card. This means that if it takes a specific set of 6 tiles to bring Dagoon, but you have one of his lesser minions out, it should now only take you a set of 5.
In a smaller game, you don’t have to worry about this concept as much, but with more people, that necessary edge of only building one type of crew of baddies is going to save you a lot of trouble in the later turns.
I have heard some people say that the game is just based on the luck of what the player before you did, and hoping it matches what you want. There is an aspect of this that is true, but this game more than many that I have played, praises the keen mind and sharp eye. Just because your world breaking move that you have been waiting for since the second turn has been blown away by one character’s flip, if you have a large enough selection of powers to choose from, you can undo any good player’s work.
The Stars Are Right is a game you are going to get quite a bit of play out of at first, but after you’ve enjoyed it with the same person a couple of time, you will see that one of you is just a little better at the actual dynamic of the game. The best thing to do is then bring it out when you have more people, because the way you play drastically changes with the different number of players.
