One Deck Galaxy

I cannot recommend One Deck Galaxy, due to a mixture of personal taste and general issue with the game. There are, in escalating order, three critical issues I have with the game: 1) The game feels over-complicated, especially when it comes to the Adversaries. Complexity isn't necessarily a bad thing - 4x titles like Stellaris or Endless Space thrive on interlocking systems that form the basis of their mechanics. The problem is that One Deck Galaxy is not a 4x game; it is, in fact, a Rougelike that plays a bit like a cross between Dicey Dungeons and Renowned Explorers. You roll dice, then use those dice to either trade for resources, explore and claim planets, or complete a check vs. the Adversary. Each Adversary has a ludicrously convoluted way of determining what it will do during each turn, but in practice it all boils down to hoovering up resources the player needs, and then either locking them behind specific actions or banishing them from the game entirely. The difference maker is that, in that convoluted process lies particulars that affect what you ought to be doing to play optimally. It may take several attempts just to figure out what the hell you're meant to be doing. 2) The game feels over-tuned, to the point of being punitive and frustrating. For some reason, the Adversaries' resource hoovering is at its worst at the very beginning of the game. This means that you [b]have[/b] to Confront it at the earliest opportunity. However, presumably in an effort to make the game harder, Confronting the Adversary is very frequently difficult to impossible without taking multiple turns to either get additional dice or get the required values on those dice. As this is happening, the Adversary is both exiling cards from the deck and forcing you to pay additional costs. Having to pay those costs means you have to devote resources to that instead of getting more dice or accumulating the resources required to Confront. And while [i]that's[/i] happening, you're also not accumulating the resources required to raise your Federation Level, which you also need to do in order to Confront the Adversary again later. Sometimes you get Encounter cards. These things were clearly meant to be addressed after you've had a chance to Confront the Adversary, as they frequently require a level 2 starbase... Except you can get them on turn 1. You can get [i]multiple[/i] Encounters on turn one. These further restrict your ability to act, meaning more turns wasted while the Adversary soft-locks you. 3) It just feels bad to play. This is definitely the most down to personal taste, but it's also the biggest reason I actively dislike playing One Deck Galaxy. I do not like the way the game aggressively kneecaps resource acquisition. I do not like the way the Adversaries locked away dice until it became mathematically impossible to Confront them. I do not like the way Federation levels all feel like acquiring them feels mutually exclusive with upgrading the Space Station, Confronting the Adversary, and acquiring Techs and Colonies - you need to do all three, but because of how all-or-nothing the systems are you inevitably end up losing time because you didn't do the other two, and oh look now you have to spend more resources and that threshold you were about to meet falls out of reach again. This game doesn't leave me with the feeling that I made a mistake that I can learn from when I lose a run. It leaves me feeling like I'm being asked to thread three needles with a single thread, only the needles are a mile apart and the thread is 3 inches long.