by Matt Lau

Created on: July 07, 2008   Last Updated: May 20, 2012

Xena Sola

1/5

About twenty years ago, I played an old card game called Waterworks. It consisted of two players who I guess are supposed to be plumbers, who take turn laying down cards that consist of pieces of pipe with bends, forks, dead-ends, and of course leaking pipes to mess with your opponent's plumbing.

Xena Sola is no Waterworks.

The premise of the game is that you and three other players are building a space station. You draw a card from a deck. On the card is a hallway, a door, a power conduit of some sort, or a combination of these. You put these down to connect a hallway to another hallway, a conduit to another conduit, a door to a door. Eventually, the station begins sprawling out in random directions, somehow you accumulate points, and after five minutes the game ends.

The instruction page was literally about fifteen words long and gave such helpful advice as: "connect three of these," while showing three cards. Of course, before playing and before seeing the cards, I had no idea what I was supposed to be connecting. The cards have a great deal of wasted detail with dark gray on black so differentiating between "hallway" and "space station extra space" took one full play through of five minutes.

To accumulate points you have three "chips" worth 1, 3, and 5 points that you can place on the cards as you play them. I have zero idea after playing three games how you score points with these. The helpful instruction page said, "Bid on cards." So, I am assuming that there is some correlation between your bid amount and connecting pieces of the space station together. Although after playing for fifteen minutes, I can't say that with any certainty. All I know is, that sometimes one of my chips would disappear from it's placement on the space station and give me some points. And sometimes, my chips would sit there without ever moving and I would lose the ability to accumulate points for the rest of the game because I have no chips left.

The game needs either a more in-depth tutorial, or better yet, some animated sequences to show how placing and connecting cards earns you points. The cards themselves should be rendered a bit clearer so that a player can see exactly what is a hallway and what is a dead-end bulkhead. The game is neither intuitive nor fun. Would I recommend buying the full version? No. I wouldn't even recommend playing the free one.

Xena Sola earns a 1 out of 5 stars.

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