STAR CLICKER

Designer: Christophe Raimbault | Publisher

Star Clicker is a cooperative tower defence game, inspired by the video games of the same genre, where players, as kid pilots, protect their home planet from the invading forces of alien Creepers. It is a little unclear why your parents have gone on a mission far away in space, leaving kids with no supervision and in possession of spaceships and missiles. However, this is not a game where the narrative premise needs to be nit-picked: just jump into the cockpit, press a few buttons, and enjoy shooting some Creepers.

Pressing buttons is, in fact, one of the main elements of the gameplay. Each player has a pilot dashboard with buttons to move and shoot in four different directions. The actions on the buttons, however, are not visible, and players can only turn over and reveal two buttons per turn, only to hide them again at the end of the round.

So, if you can’t remember what this button does… well, just press it anyway and see what happens! You will end up learning where all buttons are, eventually, but then the game will throw another curveball by shuffling your buttons. That is on top of constantly spewing waves of enemies.

To win the game, players will need to explore the space tiles, find enemy satellites, destroy them, all while shooting down the Creepers before their reach the home planet. This is not overly complex, especially when working together, except you are never quite sure if the button you press next will shoot a missile at a Creeper or a friendly space pilot.

Without the memory element, Star Clicker is a very generic tower defence game about irresponsible parenting. However, add the hilarity from trying to remember which button does what, and you can’t wait jump back into the cockpit.

❚ PLAY IT? YES