Aim for the Stars with the Fine Family Board Game Twinkle Twinkle

For example, the A scoring for black holes gives you two points for each one that isn’t adjacent to any other black holes, and three more if it’s also not adjacent to any stars or planets. The B scoring gives you five points for each black hole that’s not adjacent to another black hole, but any stars adjacent to a black hole score nothing and aren’t a part of any constellations, presumably because they tip over the time horizon and spent the rest of eternity—or roughly the length of one game of Twilight Imperium—getting stretched and squished into oblivion.

The player interaction in Twinkle Twinkle comes in the familiar mechanic where what you select in this round affects the turn order for the next round. The tiles in the market are in a row, and the farther left a tile is, the higher the priority the player that selects it gets in the next round—so if you take the leftmost tile, you will always select first in the subsequent round. Certain tiles also have a ‘slow’ designation that pushes them to the rightmost spot in the market when they come out of the bag. After everyone has selected their tile in the current round (or two tiles, in a two-player game), there will always be one tile left over, and it’s often a black hole. The remaining tile slides all the way to the left in the market to the first position, after which the tiles for the next round—which have been visible to all players—move up into the remaining market positions. Then you repeat the cycle, round after round, until everyone places their 20th tile. In the two-player version, each player gets two astronauts, and will select twice in each round, with one tile still left over. With any player count, therefore, there will often be a point where there are two or more black hole tiles in the market, so someone will have to take one. In the A scoring, that’s not a huge deal, but in the B scoring it can mess you up later in the game unless you’ve set up a spot for it.

Twinkle Twinkle’s modular setup also makes it easy to expand, with two already available: How I Wonder, which has five new celestial objects, each with A and B scoring; and Extra-Terrestrials, with one new object (with A and B scoring), and, more importantly, little green ET tokens. In the A scoring, you just get points for tokens you collect because they were on tiles in the market adjacent to UFO tiles. In the B scoring, any time you select a UFO tile, you get to increase the scoring for any of the other four tile types. You can use any five objects you’d like from across the 11 in the three boxes, with a few exceptions to make sure you’re not using an object that can’t score, with over 10000 legal combinations of scoring tiles between the sets.

There’s really nothing new under the sun (stars?) in Twinkle Twinkle; lots of games involve a fight for turn order tied to your selection in the current round, and only the stars’ scoring feels at least a little bit novel here. The game feels familiar, but it does fundamentally work; this is clearly a well-tested game, and there’s enough balance across the scoring methods that you can pursue different paths to win, and can pivot if the tiles you need don’t come out early. It’s also an incredibly quick game to learn and teach, as are most games from Allplay (whose best-known titles include Sail, River Valley Glassworks, and the latest reprint of Through the Desert), with a four-page rulebook that includes solo rules and clarifications on some scoring tiles. Games can run as quick as 15 minutes and I think the box’s suggestion of 30 as the upper bound is probably accurate even for four players. It’s a solid game, rather than a stellar one.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.