Starry Night Sky: Twinkling stars and exploring the constellations

Arizona is a great place for stargazing — it is even home to 19 dark-sky communities! There’s something so magical about looking up at the sky and imagining far-away stars and galaxies. Exploring the cosmos will probably not be something us non-millionaires can do in our lifetime, but on a game table, Starry Night Sky transports you to the heavens and the twinkle of the stars.  

Starry Night Sky, designed by Emma Larkins (who also designed the adorable card game Abandon All Artichokes), is published by Buffalo Games and came out in 2023. It plays 2-4 players, and playtime is about 30-45 minutes. 

Thanks Buffalo Games for sending me a copy of this game!

In Starry Night Sky, players are astronomers taking to the heavens, exploring and mapping constellations, while completing goals and finishing end-game myths. Starry Night Sky is a beautiful family game — with vivid shades of dark blues and celestial gold — with a wonderful astronomy theme. The game comes with plastic telescopes, which players use to travel across constellations. The bag full of star tokens — sparkly plastic red, yellow and blue shaped pieces — makes the game extra delightful to play with. 

Each turn has two phases: Gather and Explore. During Gather, you draw an exploration goal (if you don’t have three in front of you already) and draw new stars from the bag. You must then assign each star to one Star Pool, of which you have three on your player board. Star Pools can only hold 4 stars maximum, and once a star is in your star pool, they cannot be moved somewhere else. This small yet important decision where to place your stars adds some strategy to this gorgeous game.

Then it’s time to Explore. To Explore, you move your telescope to a neighboring constellation on the board along the lines that connect constellations. Do you move toward the Vivid Orchid or the Energetic Houseplant? Such whimsical names and charming artwork! If you are the first player to move into a constellation, you place a discovery marker on it from the discovery track on the board. These tokens mark the timing of the game — once a certain number of discovery markers are removed from the track, the end of the game triggers. 

Players score points for discovering constellations as well as placing stars on your board from exactly one of your star pools during this turn. Each star you place is another victory point and if you place the last star on the board for the constellation, the discovery market is flipped over to its completed side. That means the constellation is fully mapped. 

Fully mapped constellations are important for myth cards, which are end-game objectives that score when certain constellations are mapped, regardless of whoever mapped it. These myth cards that you receive at the start of the game help guide you across the galaxy toward the constellations you want to map out but, like in real life, the galaxy is vast and sometimes it’s just plain difficult to make it all the way across. Luckily, you can still score points each turn with exploration goals. 

Exploration goals are challenges that you can complete during the course of the game for extra points. Challenges such as “Place 1 yellow and 1 blue star in 1 constellation on your turn” or “End turn with 2 stars in each Star Pool.” In a pinch, you can discard exploration cards to grab a star you need. Players can also do a bonus exploration once per turn if they move into a partially mapped constellation. 

As the game progresses, it becomes easier to move across the board as you can pass through mapped constellations and land on the next available partially mapped constellation. But by that point, the game is nearly over and hopefully you’ve accumulated enough VPs to win the game.

Taking advantage of the bonus exploration helps your telescope zoom around the board board, and sometimes just dropping off a few stars at a constellation nets more VPs at the moment based on what your exploration cards say. The game ends when a certain number of constellations are mapped; it varies with player count.

Starry Night Sky is perfect for those who love stargazing and those who love a strategic family game. It’s fun, beautiful to look at, and players can feel accomplished semi-working together to map the stars. Maybe one day you’ll discover a new constellation and name it the Distinguished Snail. Look at this dapper little fellow!