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The overview from Final Frontier Games begins “The girl reached into the wood ash and grabbed a palmful, and as she blew it from her palm, the ashes swirled and churned as they moved skyward, lighting up the once dark skies.” And to be honest, that had me more than intrigued as to what lay inside the box. Let’s delve into the San African mythology and see whether The Girl Who Made The Stars is a shining light or a dimmer twinkling light.
The Girl Who Made The Stars is an intriguing thing. There’s a familiar large central board that has some neat mechanisms for the worker placement half of the game, and each player gets their own personal player board and a bag of star tiles for the tile-laying half of the game.
Put those two halves together and you get something that feels quite different to anything I’ve encountered before, but never feels so brand new that you’re struggling to get to grips with any element of it.
It has some beautiful production and some lovely artwork that belies the level of thinking and strategy that you need to consider to get a significant point total from everything that’s on offer.
Setup
Let’s get one bit out of the way now and say that this game has a lot of bits – which is nice, but also quite fiddly, especially the first time you punch it all out.
Each player has a bag of 38 different star tiles with a mix of colours and shapes on them. In fairness to the game, my inattention to detail meant I was blindly sorting them how I assumed they’d go so don’t make the same mistake as me there. You do need to be careful about making sure those complete sets are right because it would be a faff to unpick if not. There’s a fair few tokens (of each different type of resource) which are quite small and a bit fiddly to stack on their respective spaces on the village board (which you’ll have placed in the centre of your table).
Each player gets a set of four constellation tiles that they’ll place in the corners of their board. What’s nice here is that these player boards are dual-layered so the star tiles you’ll place throughout the game don’t slide around. Your constellation tiles aren’t slotting into those dual-layered spaces though as they become single-use and then removed from your board once activated. You’ll place three of your four works in spaces at the top of your board, and one on the “+1 worker” constellation tile to be unlocked later.
There are some lovely light fragments in three colours, as well as some grey stardust tokens that all have assigned spaces on the board which is nice, and saves table space with more token holders or trays. You’ll choose five random Offering tiles from the eight available and place them on the board. You’ll remove one at the end of each of the five rounds.
Finally, you need to construct the Disc Tower and fix it to the Gazing board. This acts as a kind of dice tower where you’ll drop some chunky wooden tokens that you’ll draft to give you ongoing game benefits. It’s split into four sections – one for each colour of light, plus a wild choice in the middle. There’s a neat touch that the board has an offset wooden peg to stop everything hitting the far side of the board and landing in the same place on the blue light area. I’ll come back to my thoughts on this feeling fiddly here. Cardboard dice towers aren’t that tough, but fixing it to the board and building the latter fence to keep everything contained was a little on the frustrating side. There are areas for everything to slot into, but it took a few goes to get it stable. It’s a nice component and actually serves a real purpose so it’s worth persevering.
You’ll place the green girl meeple in the space with her outline on – though this is incredibly hard to see but you can count the spaces – and each player puts their Elder meeple behind her in a random order which will determine first player for each round.
And after all that, you’re not ready to go!
Star Gazing
There are three main phases to each of the five rounds, plus an old-fashioned “clean up phase” each time as well.
We begin with the stargazing phase of The Girl Who Made The Stars where our newly constructed Disc Tower is immediately called into action! The first player for the round draws a number of those chunky wood ash tokens from their bag equal to the number of players plus one, before dropping them into the top of the tower and seeing them land on the Gazing board. Then beginning with the first player you each draft one of those tokens and slot them into the dual-layered space on the bottom of your personal board. If it has a light icon on it, you’ll take one of the fragments from the supply matching the colour of the area on the Gazing board it came from. So if you picked a token in the blue area and it had a light icon, you’d put a blue fragment on top to remind you that you’ll get that particular benefit when placing blue light fragments only.
There are a good variety of these tokens, offering placement benefits, victory points for offering certain resources and effective discounts on certain actions later on. These all stack up so you’ll end up with an increasing number of benefits as the game progresses.
Star Placement
Once you’re through this fairly quick phase of The Girl Who Made The Stars, we move onto star tile placement phase where your puzzle-solving abilities come to the fore.
Each player simultaneously reaches into their bag and draws five star tiles from it which they need to place onto their board. Tiles have a variety of the three colours of light, plus a few brown stars which get you no light or benefit. All the times are doubled sided, with the reverse being a single brown star with a single joining line, whilst the front can have between two and four joining lines in a mix of colours.
Your challenge is to place the tiles on your board to create star clusters – areas of contiguous star tiles where all the paths are closed off. This is where the reverse of the tiles can come in handy as they serve as good terminating points for the clusters you’re building. Any star tile you place that has its colour side facing up gets a matching light fragment placed on it.
At this point I’m bringing the rulebook into the discussion. Some of it is really well put together, with photographic examples and well-structured bullet points. The tile placement bit is really well done – photos illustrate each type of prohibited action and set out really neatly with clear bullet points which makes learning and teaching easy.
Then there’s the rewards for completing clusters or loops – which are different things but are important to get clear because this is where you’ll be getting a lot of light and stardust resources. I’ll try and make these clear here now:
- Each time you create an enclosed loop of lines, you gain a Stardust token from the supply
- Every time a star tile with a light fragment on has all its lines meeting something else, you immediately take that light fragment from it and place it in your supply
- You then also score points for completing a Star Cluster which is a group of contiguous star tiles that has all its paths closed off, either by point to other paths or to spaces with Stardust tokens on them (see below). Once you’ve achieved this, you count the number of non-brown stars in that cluster and look at the point token stacks at the top of the board that show icons for 3, 4, 5 or 6+ stars – you then score the points showing on the top token, and flip it over if it’s showing its dark side.
If the completed cluster is next to a constellation tile (remember we placed these in the corners at the start), then you flip that constellation tile to activate either a one-time benefit or a worker placement space for the next phase.
If this sounds complicated, I get it, and agree to some degree, but once you’re in the middle of it, there’s a certain logic and relative ease to the whole thing so don’t be dissuaded by a complicated sounding description and do give it a go because it’s an incredibly clever little puzzle.
I’ve mentioned Stardust tokens a few times so I’ll cover those now before we move onto The Girl Who Made The Stars Worker Placement!
Stardust!
Stardust tokens are little grey wooden discs that you can use to effectively fill in gaps in your star clusters when you’re placing your tiles. You can play them at any time during the entire game, so you can watch things unfold and delay a decision before deciding what you want to do.
To place them in a space, you need to add one for each line that’s pointing into the empty space you’re about to fill. So two paths pointing into a space needs two Stardust to fill it.
What’s exceptionally good here is that once you’ve placed your Stardust, you can’t add further tokens to that space, meaning you can’t choose to terminate future paths or clusters into that route. You’ll need to draw your paths carefully and given yourself time and space to most efficiently place these.
They’ll help you close off clusters and unlock your constellations, but doing it too soon, or in a space too central to your other plans can limit what you do later in the game. Use them wisely!
Worker Placement
Each player in The Girl Who Made The Stars starts with three workers that can go either onto one of three spaces on the village board, or onto certain spaces on your own player board.
All the spaces on the village board are ‘open’ so anyone can place any number of their workers on any of the spaces. The spaces on your own board are only for your workers and are single use.
The first space is Paths Of Light where you can ‘spend’ your light fragments to develop the paths from that space to the 13 different resource gathering spots around the board. You can place as many light fragments as you want, but matching colours can never be adjacent on the board. When you’ve placed your light, you count up the number of fragments you’ve placed and then refer to the score token piles at the top of the board that you used to score your clusters in the previous phase.
The Gathering Resources spaces can only be used if the paths to them have been unlocked (i.e. they have a light fragment in the space next to them). Once they’re available, you can place a worker there and pay the first half of the light equation to gain the resource on that space. You can optionally pay the second half of that same equation to gain an extra benefit – typically victory points. You can only visit these spaces if there are available resources to gain and each space has one resource per player so they can get exhausted quickly.
The Offering space allows you to then spend these newly acquired resources as an offering to gain victory points. Once you’ve placed a worker, you first gain a victory point for each different type of resource you have, and then you’ll place one resource on the Offering Tile and score the points that it’s worth. There’s a tile for each round, and each has a variable number of spaces (and point values) for different resources so there’s some loose push-your-luck thinking that comes into play here.
Your personal board will allow you to either activate the one-time abilities of “gain an extra worker”, “recall two workers” or “rescore one of your constellations” spaces, providing you’ve unlocked them. There’s also an ongoing space where you can “gaze” and this will give you between one and three Stardust tokens (depending on what’s showing on the empty worker spaces) and a light token. The colour of that light is determined by the placement of the sole remaining Wood Ash token from the very beginning of the round that’s still on the Gazing board.
Clean Up
Once everyone’s done everything, you’ll clean up by moving the girl meeple up a space on the Gazing board and moving the Elder meeple at the back into the free space behind her. Everyone recalls their workers, discards any used constellation tiles and any VP tokens with their light side showing. You’ll remove any resources from the Offering tile and then discard that, revealing the next one in the stack. Finally, put the last Wood Ash token back in the bag and go again for another four rounds of the wonderful The Girl Who Made The Stars.
Final Thoughts
If I’ve made The Girl Who Made The Stars sound a bit fiddly and complex, then that’s not an unfair accusation – guilty as charged. Do bear in mind there are two quite different game elements operating together here, with tile-laying and worker placement both come together and have some elements of intersection in how you make decisions, so it is complex to explain, but actually once you get into it and start playing, it’s simple to grasp but perhaps trickier to master.
Our first game saw all of us creating quite large clusters (and mixing up the rules on getting Stardust didn’t help) and placing large paths of light every turn because that felt easy to see where the points could come from, and how you’d unlocked other worker placement spaces.
I think being slightly more strategic and doing just enough to unlock some spaces and saving more light to get resources and points could be more lucrative and also offer more options for workers as you get into the end of the game.
As with a few games, this felt a little daunting to me at the start, particularly with the raft of pieces and bits of construction that were needed to get it on the table. But once you start playing and watching the different elements of the puzzle unfold, it feels incredibly intuitive, and I don’t think you can overstate how important that is when you’re playing something.
Our first game definitely had a few “wait let me check” moments, but it all clicks together pretty quickly and actually builds into a really good game.
It’s also pretty stunning, with the light fragments adding some real colour to the rest of the art which looks lovely and encapsulates the theme well and sensitively too.
There’s a solo mode and in this edition of The Girl Who Made The Stars, there are a couple of small Kickstarter modules as well, though I’ve not covered those here.
Ultimately The Girl Who Made The Stars was a bit of a roller coaster for me. I was heavily drawn in by the box art and the theme, and then almost immediately apprehensive once I started taking in all the bits and pieces. That all finished with a crescendo of real enjoyment throughout. I was keen to play a second game as soon as the first finished and I think that’s another feeling that’s not always generated by games and can be overlooked as a real plus point.
