Sol: Last Days of a Star

About this board game

Sol: Last Days of a Star is a 1–5 player board game, playable in about 90 minutes, in which planetary efforts race to power an Ark before the Sun explodes.

The Sun is becoming increasingly unstable, and every player must help gather the energy needed for one final escape. The challenge is that the dying star is also the only source of enough power to propel a small selection of survivors into deep space. Your actions can hasten the catastrophe even as they bring your Ark closer to safety.

The board represents the solar environment, with two orbital layers and three layers within the Sun: the Convective, Radiative, and Core regions. Deeper actions offer greater rewards, but they also increase the Sun’s instability more quickly.

• Launch ships from your slowly rotating Mothership, the only place they can begin useful tasks.
• Convert ships into stations or use them to activate your own and other players’ stations.
• Activate Energy Nodes to gain energy, then power Ship Foundries or Transmit Towers.
• Send energy through Transmit Towers to your Ark, converting it into Momentum for the final escape.

Activating your own stations provides the full reward, while activating another player’s station means sharing the reward with its owner. Ships are a limited and constantly changing resource, since building new stations requires converting them.

Before ships can enter the Sun, you must construct Solar Gates that span the high-energy membranes between its layers. In Sol: Last Days of a Star, careful timing and resource management are essential as you push deeper, transmit energy, and attempt to escape before the solar system is engulfed.