It is the future. The year 2,000. After enduring alien abductions in Silos and a testy diplomatic delegation in Ego, humanity has become just as insipid as ever. That’s the subject of Orbit, the third and final volume in Reiner Knizia’s intergalactic trilogy and the first title of the saga that doesn’t improve on one of the Good Doctor’s older games.

As reluctant as I am to say it, it shows.

These planets won’t stay still for a dang minute!

Look, I’m as excited as anybody at the prospect of visiting alien worlds. Star Trek is my jam. My browser opens directly to the James Webb Space Telescope live feed. In Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, I was unreservedly on the side of the Utopians. So when I say that I will be the first body thawed out for the brain-probe to Alpha Centauri, you will agree.

Orbit is about interstellar tourism, but it somehow manages to make the prospect of dropping by Saturn for a weekend seem almost mundane. That’s fine. This is a route-optimization board game, after all. It only needs to succeed at the routes and the optimization.

It very nearly does.

Your goal is to be the first space tourist to visit seven alien worlds before returning to your home planet. The big wrinkle is that these planets are basically the three-body problem magnified to eight bodies, bouncing around like billiards balls on a frictionless table. Their routes are set. You can see them in advance. But every turn when somebody plays a card to move their little saucer across the galactic map, they’re also required to shift at least one planet. Sometimes these movements are simple. The ringed blue planet moves one space forward along its orbital path. The red planet jumps forward by two spaces. The green and brown planets both move. That sort of thing.

The cards aren’t the most exciting method for resolving turns.

Every so often, and especially once you mix in some of the expansions, things get zanier. These inject some much-needed life into Orbit, and they’re enough of an improvement that I really don’t recommend playing without them. Temporary nebulae can be placed on the board to slingshot planets farther along their paths, making it harder for players to intersect with their intended destination. The reverse side of the board allows planets to move along variable rather than linear paths, letting the current player alter their orbital mechanics entirely. Presumably these sudden reversals aren’t killing entire biospheres with their hundred-thousand-KPH inversions.

Not that it would matter if they did. This is the blandest sort of tourism. You’re chasing stamps in your passport, not that local flavor. The distinguishing feature of the purple planet is that it gives you a purple stamp, not that its distinct purple hue derives from a particular tundra lichen or its bromine atmosphere. The dark planet that creeps along the board’s outer perimeter might seem foreboding, but it’s more like the outer ring of a transit system, slow but perfectly useful if you aren’t in a hurry.

Ack! There I go again. Orbit doesn’t want to do those things and that’s fair enough. But what it does well isn’t especially interesting. Playing a card lets you move your ship — a weirdly burdened affair given the faintness of the lines on the board — and shift a planet, but also lets you gather energy cubes for additional movement or flip a planet to a new heading. Everything is functional enough. But the cards don’t inspire either cleverness or excitement. Regardless of what you draw, your movements will fall into the same general range. Occasional cards move extra planets, but don’t top off your batteries. For a Knizia game, it’s all so featureless.

Upgrading your hand size and energy storage is worthwhile.

The game’s primary zest comes from its wellsprings of dickery. Because planets carry ships whenever they move, and can pick up ships when they intersect in marked spaces, clever players will often park themselves in the path of an oncoming planet. These intergalactic taxis bridge the void in a fraction of the time your little thrusters require, so much of the strategy comes down to hopping planets like a flea riding dogs across the park.

But! There’s nothing stopping a rival player from playing cards that spin a planet away from your position. Or, if they have one of the rare cards that moves a planet twice, blitzing it past your position. It’s like standing at a bus stop only for the bus to blast past like you’re the invisible man, putting you late for work and tweaking your social anxiety at the same time. Unsurprisingly, matches often come down to whichever player evades getting bypassed the most. When played with jerks, the whole thing becomes livelier, more animated.

That isn’t the same as being good. There are simply too many ways to get around the whims of those spinning celestial bodies. There are space stations for upgrading your hand or batteries, and even board-spanning wormholes that deposit you closer to your intended destination.

These wormholes represent the game’s conundrum in micro. Because Orbit isn’t a game that can be played poorly, neither is it a game that can be played well. In every single play, everyone has been within reach of their final planet. It’s like Around the World in Eighty Days, except everybody waltzes into that smoking parlor within a five-minute window. Also, no adventures were had along the way.

Oh, that’s nice.

I don’t want to short-sell it too badly. The problem Orbit places before you isn’t bad by any means. It’s certainly better than the last move-between-orbiting-planets game I played, with breezy rules and a pleasant aesthetic. It helps that you can smack a planet out of a friend’s reach. That’s never not funny.

But compared to Silos and Ego, Orbit is the runt of the litter. It lacks not only the pedigree of those titles, but also their gradual improvements and even sense of place. Gone is the player psychology, the adventure, the downright silliness. Instead, these tourists are the dull sort who view heritage sights through their cameras and refuse to taste the local cuisine. Maybe the aliens were right to prefer cows.

Orbit, along with Silos and Ego, is on Kickstarter right now.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A prototype copy was provided.