ORBIT, or to give it its full name, Orbital Race Between Interstellar Tourists, is a 2025 offering from prolific designer Reiner Knizia for 2–4 players taking half to an hour to play. It’s part of the Knizia ‘epic sci-fi trilogy’ published by Bitewing Games, along with SILOS and EGO, which have equally convoluted expanded titles.
As is the case with the majority of Knizia games, the turn structure is simple, but the game hides a lot of challenges. In ORBIT, you’re competing to visit all 8 planets on the board (9 if you choose to play the Prism Variant—see later) and return to your starting planet before your opponents get to theirs, but player actions can cause the planets to move along their rather eccentric orbits, making it difficult to predict where they’ll be, especially with larger numbers of players.
ORBIT, or to give it its full name, Orbital Race Between Interstellar Tourists, is a 2025 offering from prolific designer Reiner Knizia for 2–4 players taking half to an hour to play. It’s part of the Knizia ‘epic sci-fi trilogy’ published by Bitewing Games, along with SILOS and EGO, which have equally convoluted expanded titles.
As is the case with the majority of Knizia games, the turn structure is simple, but the game hides a lot of challenges. In ORBIT, you’re competing to visit all 8 planets on the board (9 if you choose to play the Prism Variant—see later) and return to your starting planet before your opponents get to theirs, but player actions can cause the planets to move along their rather eccentric orbits, making it difficult to predict where they’ll be, especially with larger numbers of players.
Playing the Game
The large board has two sides: an ‘easy’ one where planets’ orbits are single loops, while the other side offers branching orbits, adding to unpredictability. The planets are initially placed randomly along their orbits, ideally distributed across the board rather than clumped together. Space stations are randomly drawn and placed on their spots.
Players then choose a board, the colour of which determines their starting planet, upon which they place their spaceship. Because earlier players will have a slight move advantage in the game, this choice is done in reverse order, so that later players can pick better starting locations. Finally, players are dealt 3 movement cards.
And then the race begins…
On their move, players choose a card from their hand and act on it, then discard it and draw another card from the deck (or more if hand size has been increased). Each card offers up to 3 actions: always present are the ability to move your spaceship up to the specified number (plus energy) of steps and to move 1 or more planets along their orbit (actually that’s not quite true, but I’ll come back to this when I mention nebulas and variants), taking any ships on the planet along for the ride. The third operation is one of:
- take a specified number of energy cubes—these can be traded in for additional ship moving steps, but you’re only allowed to store a certain number on your player board; or
- change the direction of a planet’s motion—each planet has a little arrow on it, the idea being that it always moves along its orbit in that direction… until someone plays a card with the direction change icon.
The 2 or 3 operations can be carried out in any order, but all must be performed.
Player boards have spaces for the visited planets, initially occupied by planet tokens (the ‘mission markers’), as well as rows indicating current hand size and energy capacity. Visiting space stations can fill in spaces on the hand size and energy capacity rows, increasing those levels. In more detail, landing on a space station offers the following options:
- increase hand size—take the marker and add it to the hand size row;
- increase energy capacity—similar for the energy row;
- hyperjump—if you land on one of these at the end of your normal movement, you can instantly jump to another such marker;
- fuel depot—add the indicated number of energy cubes, limited by your capacity; o
- hyper accelerator cannon—zoom off in a straight line in any direction from this space.
When you visit a planet, you remove the corresponding mission marker; some of these are marked with the same icons as appear on space stations, letting you perform the appropriate operation.
The game ends when someone has removed all of their mission markers and has returned to their home planet. Needless to say, other players will be doing their best to play cards to move your planet to exactly where you don’t want it to be!
Variants
The Prism Variant (Prime Revolutionary Intergalactic Stationary Megalopolis, yes, really) introduces an extra planet that must be visited. This planet is initially positioned at a random space station location and doesn’t move thereafter (hence the ‘stationery’).
The Partnership Variant (no clever acronym this time, eh?) lets a group of 4 players act in pairs, sharing energy cubes and optionally using single-shot friendship or exchange tiles, letting one player’s ship piggyback on another or switch places—this can be convenient when one player is on a planet the other of the pair hasn’t yet visited. The players in the pair can also discuss how to perform the operations on the card either plays, though they’re not allowed to show the other player the cards still in their hands.
Finally, the Dual Spaceship Variant lets 2 players control 2 ships each—kind of like the Partnership mode, but each pair is under the control of a single person.
Expansion Modules
As a bit of a tease, the rulebook contains instructions for the Nebular Expansion. This contains 3 modules which can be added to the game individually or in combination.
- Navigation Tokens Module: each player gets 3 single-use tokens which will let them swap their entire hand of cards, immediately move to a hyperjump portal, or fill up with energy cubes—all of which will accelerate the game;
- Hyper Acceleration Engine Module: once a player has maximised their energy capacity, they gain a hyper acceleration engine, such that subsequently, a card that would normally provide energy instead acts in the same way as the hyper acceleration cannon, letting you travel as far as you like in a straight line; and
- Artificial Nebulas Module: when a card showing a nebula icon is played, the player places a nebula token on any planet’s orbit, such that the planet will skip past that point on its move, and spaceships can no longer visit that space.
Note that the base game contains cards that show nebula symbols where the planet movement would be indicated, meaning that some cards do offer fewer actions than normal when not using this module.
Verdict
ORBIT is a quick game, at least until you get close to the end and have to work out how to best get your final planet(s) while blocking whoever’s in front. For me, the most enjoyable bit is the conflict—er, I mean, interaction—between players, where any plans you might have had are thrown into total disarray by someone else. This does mean, I think, the game works best for higher numbers of players, and I find the basic 2-player game a bit dull—you can spend all your time keeping out of each other’s way. The Dual Spaceship Variant deals with that to some degree, but at the cost of making the game overlong.
In terms of construction, it’s solidly made, with wooden planets and chunky cardboard tokens and boards. The plastic spaceships are a bit weedy, but adequate.
Two games struck me as having a similar feel to ORBIT. First, Rebirth, another Knizia game. Here, move structure is very simple: draw a tile, play it. But the interactions between players make the game interesting and tense.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Wandering Towers too, another game where actions are determined by cards in players’ hands. In ORBIT, a single spaceship has to visit a number of planets which move around depending on players’ actions, whereas in Wandering Towers, several wizards are trying to reach a single tower that moves due to players’ actions. What’s more, Wandering Tower’s potions and spells behave a little like ORBIT’s energy boosts.
Also like ORBIT, I find both Rebirth and Wandering Towers are more fun with larger player counts.
If you like either of those games, you’re sure to find ORBIT a good addition to your collection.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
