The moon isn’t a great place for rare minerals and Mars seems to be more a destination for colonization than exploitation of its ore and mineral wealth. Venus? Fuhgeddaboudit. But the asteroid belt, that’s an interesting possibility and there are already companies working on developing the technology to fly to specific asteroids, mine the heck out of ’em, and fly back, loaded down with trillions of dollars in rare ores. Fifty years after the first asteroid mining operation, it’ll be commonplace and not only will there be roving groups of miners, but there’ll likely also be pirates too, seeking to exploit the expensive work of others to swoop in and grab the most valuable minerals.

That’s the world of the tile-matching game Vesta. Designed by Harvey & Carlie Cornell and published by Dragon Phoenix Games, it’s built around the challenge of mining resources in the optimal order, all while placing them in your own base so that you can bring all the reactors you need online. This is all simulated with mah-jongg tiles, but not Mah-Jongg the Chinese tile gambling game but rather the computer game spin-off that displays a stacked collection of tiles that can only be removed in pairs, until you hopefully reveal the image below the tile stacks.

This will all be much clearer when you see the Mine with some of the 120 mining tiles placed:

Important: Before I go further, I do need to disclose that I was sent a late-stage prototype of the game by Dragon Phoenix Games, so the art and individual components are all subject to change in the final production game.

The numbers on the neoprene mine mat represent the height of the tile stack on that space, which is why the stacked tiles on the right portion of the image have differing heights. The game will include at least three different mine mats; I played most of my solo games with Oppia Crater. Once all the tiles are placed, a subset are flipped over, revealing the exposed resources in the mine for that round of play.

Vesta supports 1-4 players and I recommend playing with at least two players, for reasons I’ll explain a bit later. For now, let’s go through all the game components and setup.

GAME SETUP AND COMPONENTS

The game flow requires each player to mine resources, attack pirates if there are any in view, flip tiles in your own base, and build reactors if you have the energy resources. You can earn Credits by selling Rare Earth resources that then let you purchase Mining tools or Defense weapons. Each player gets their own Base and Character, and as you can see below, each Character has different starting weapons and capabilities:

Angie Neary is an Engineer and “may build colony tiles at +1 level”, while Gunther Hammer is an Astro Miner, which gives him the ability to “use any mining tool for any mining function”. To win, you’ll need to balance defense – to fight off those asteroid pirates! – and mining abilities. Whether you’re playing with one, two, three, or four players, the goal of the game remains the same: Build 10 reactors.

There are two marketplaces in the game that you can visit at any time; Mining Tools and Defense Weapons. I stacked them one atop the other on the left of the Mine, as you’ll see. Here’s a close up so you can read some of the card values, with Mining Tools on top and Defense Weapons below:

Mining Tool cards have a purchase cost (the ₵ symbol on the lower right), an alternative capability (the 👁️ symbols), and a main capability. For example, the Phrased Extractor allows you to “Take a pair of tiles where one is locked”.

Locked? There are four states for a tile in the mine, which is critical to understand: Free tiles have their value revealed and can be picked up on a mining turn. Revealed tiles are those that have their value revealed, but are surrounded on both sides by other tiles, preventing you from picking them up from the mine (without a relevant Mining Tool, at least). Covered tiles are still value face down and have other tiles on top of them. They are completely inaccessible. Finally, Uncovered tiles are face down, but don’t have another tile above them. They too are completely inaccessible in that stage. This will make more sense momentarily.

The lower cards in the image above are the defense weapons, and like Mining Tools, have their price indicated by the number of ₵ symbols on the lower right. They are critical for success because you will have to fight pirates! For example, the BLS Grenade allows you to “destroy any one pirate tile. Single use.” while the KF Stun Field “suns all pirates for this attack. Single use.”

Finally, notice the Z-Charge packs: each player starts with a weapon and limited ammo; if you use up your ammunition but don’t purchase more, that weapon’s not going to help you against those pesky pirates.

Through multiple plays, I’ve grown to appreciate “Biff Parsec” with his super helpful ability to apply +1 damage to any attack. Indeed, here’s my starting Base – Antonia – along with the Character card, Blaster, Ammo, quick reference cards, and starting Energy:

Everyone starts with a single Reactor on their Base, as denoted by the orange and yellow circle against the black background on the lower left. Empty spaces can hold mine tiles and those with a tiny pip are available for lower player count games; 3 for 3 or 4 player games, 2 for 2, 3, or 4 player games, and 1 for solo games. In other words, the more players you have in the game, the less squares each of you will have available in your base.

All told, here’s my initial setup for a solo game of Vesta:

The only tasks left in the above image are to pick a Character, grab its starting weapons from the deck, and flip over a subset of the Mine tiles. Here’s how the latter looks:

Tiles with the creepy skull graphics are pirates! Since it’s the very beginning of the game, they don’t attack but instead lie in waiting for an attack, joining the enemies opportunistically. Otherwise, like Mah-Jongg, each tile has a color and a numeric value, as represented by the occurrences of its relevant symbol. Orange are regolith tiles, Blue are asteroid rocks, green are metal, pink are Helium-3, and purple are rare Earth elements. For example, the lower right green tile is a 3 of Iron, while the top right (and top left!) are a 4 of Regolith. Helium-3 is different in that they can include white dots on their tiles that indicate bonus energy collected if they’re mined; you don’t have to match those dots, just the occurrences of the Helium graphic. On the top left stack there are two matching 5 of Helium-3 tiles that will yield 3 bonus energy!

LET’S PLAY VESTA

Each turn consists of a player collecting energy depending on how many reactors they’ve built, followed by either taking a pair of matching mine tiles, playing a mining tools card, or attacking pirates with a defense card (yes, they should be called weapon cards since you can use defense cards offensively). You can then optionally make purchases with Credits you’ve earned this turn (they don’t roll over, so you use ’em or lose ’em), use Mining equipment to prospect, flip tiles on your base, or repair damage at a rate of 1 repair = 1 energy.

My first move will be to grab those two Helium-3 tiles:

That’s three extra energy, super helpful because it costs 1 or 2 energy to flip tiles, then 10 energy to build a reactor. The cost of flipping tiles varies because regolith (orange) is easier to work with so only costs 1 energy to flip. Everything else costs 2. Reactors can only be built on freshly flipped tiles, so there’s no benefit to flipping tiles until you’re ready to build.

I generally start my games by chopping down pirates, actually, because however many are revealed in the initial setup, they’re all going to pile onto your first attack, which can be more than a bit overwhelming!  One benefit of Biff Parsec is that with his +1 on attacks, you can immediately take out five pirates!

A little bit further along in the game, I’m ready to build my first reactor. I have two regolith tiles placed on my Base and 11 energy, ready to spend…

Only similar color tiles can be flipped to prepare the space for a reactor so even if these were different numeric values, I could proceed. I spend 1 energy to flip the two, then 10 energy to build a reactor. Pirates can show up 1, 2, or 3 strong, but once you defeat them, they act as wild cards on your Base:

In the above you can see my shiny new reactor, the flipped regolith required to build it, and the additional tiles I’ve placed on my base. Remember that both the green 3-pirate tile and the pink 2-pirate tile on the top right edge are wild cards that can assume just about any value. (Caveats: They can’t be considered Helium-3 and if you use them as Rare Earth, they’re worth 1 ₵ per pirate symbol).

One of the challenges of the game is thinking through tile placement on your base, because once you run out of spaces, you lose. Tiles can be stacked, but there are a bunch of rules about valid and legal stacking that includes how high each stack can be based on the height of adjacent spaces. The great benefit of steel (green) tiles is that they can be slipped underneath tiles that are image up, for example, while rock (blue) tiles can be stacked up to 3 high regardless of the height of adjacent tiles. Further along, my base is filling up:

I’ve got two reactors now, so my per-round energy production has gone up. One more reactor and I’ll be pulling in 3 energy per round, which is pretty good when you consider you only need 10 (plus the cost of a flip movement) to build yet another reactor. Reactors, however, must be placed adjacent to black spaces or other reactors, so careful planning is critical.

Once you remove every tile from a level, all tiles of the next level are revealed. If pirates are revealed, they lurk in waiting for the next attack, just as they do in the very beginning of the game:

Each time you take a tile through mining, you have to reveal adjacent tiles that are then freed up (that is, have one or both long sides exposed). With four pirates already lurking, the next mining move is going to require some thought because if it reveals more pirates, things could go bad fast. Every pirate attack you can’t defend, either through weapons or your base shield, inflicts damage to a spot on your base. Incur more damage than you have available spaces and… you lose.

And so, finally, after over an hour of planning, attacking, and mining, I actually surprised myself and placed the tenth reactor:

This means I won the game, but it was pretty darn close, I have to admit. At times I wasn’t sure I could see a path out of my Base tile deployment, but reminding myself of the flipping and placement rules helped, as did exploiting pirates to be convenient paired tiles for one I wanted to flip over and use as a building base.

THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ON VESTA

As someone who grew up learning the Chinese version of Mah-Jongg (which has a lot of similarity to Gin Rummy) I was intrigued by the concept of using those tiles as the basis of an asteroid mine. It’s a fun idea. However, perhaps I lack sufficiently steady hands but I found it tricky to flip a single tile or even set up all the tiles without everything being sloppy and misaligned. If you’re an OCD type who wants everything in neat rectilinear rows, Vesta might not be the game for you. 🤓

The bigger issue is that with the current generation of the guide (keep in mind that I looked at a late-stage prototype, not the final production version) there were rules that seemed arbitrary rather than logical. This isn’t uncommon with prototypes, but I find games that have an underlying logic more appealing, where you can understand the logic of a rule or exception rather than it seeming like it was added to make things more – or, sometimes, less – complicated.

Vesta proves to also be a surprisingly difficult solo game because the overall goal of building 10 reactors remains the same, but you have far fewer spaces on your base than you would with a 2, 3, or 4-player game. (Consider this: going from two players down to solo adds two spaces to the player’s mine, while losing an entire second base). As a result, I recommend this be best as a multiplayer game, not a solo title. This could be fixed with staggered solo difficulty goals: 6 reactors for an easy game, 8 for a standard game, and all 10 reactors for a challenging game.

Having said that, as I got into the flow, I really did enjoy the game, with its simultaneous challenges of which tiles to pull from the mine and how to then best place them on your individual base, and in what order. Tile flipping is much more strategic than it may seem, and I found the defense cards far more useful than mining tools (bring on the pirates!). Vesta‘s a fun, family friendly game that needs just a smidge more polish to really shine.

Vesta. Designed by Harvey & Carlie Cornell and published by Dragon Phoenix Games. Coming to Kickstarter October. 2024, with an anticipated base price of $65.00.

Disclaimer: Dragon Phoenix Games sent me a pre-production prototype of the game in return for this candid preview.