Year: 2024 | Players: 2–8 | Min: 45 | Ages: 11+
This A Message From The Stars review was made after playing the game eight times. The publisher sent us a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.
What is A Message From The Stars?
A Message From The Stars is a cooperative or team word game in which you take turns giving clues and trying to guess each other’s secret words using a unique cipher and scoring system.
A Message From The Stars was designed by Clarence Simpson and published by Allplay.
Rules Overview
In A Message From the Stars (co-op mode), one player takes the role of an Alien while everyone else plays as the Scientists. Both sides receive a secret message card and select three hidden words. Over four rounds, you’ll exchange clue words and try to decode each other’s messages. The Scientists have an added challenge: figuring out six hidden cipher letters the Alien uses to score clues.
Each round, the Alien and Scientists take turns sending clue words. Every clue is scored using a hidden cipher made up of six letters. The Alien calculates the score and passes it along with the clue, giving the Scientists a chance to make deductions. By the end of the game, both sides will try to guess each other’s three words, and the Scientists will also guess the six cipher letters.
Game Flow
Each round includes two transmissions:
- Alien’s Turn: The Alien sends a clue word and its cipher score to the Scientists.
- Scientists’ Turn: The Scientists send a clue word back. The Alien writes down its cipher score and returns it.
Clue words need to be related to the sender’s hidden message but can’t include any words from their message card.
The cipher score is based on the letters in the clue word and how they interact with the Alien’s hidden cipher. That cipher contains:
- Three Trust letters – Each adds one point to the score.
- Two Amplify letters – Each one doubles the total so far.
- One Suspicion letter – If present, the entire score becomes negative.
The Scientists don’t know what the six cipher letters are, but each clue helps them eliminate possibilities.
The Alien tries to piece together the Scientists’ message from the clues they send.
Scoring is straightforward. You get one point for each correct message word by either side (up to 6 points) and one point for each cipher letter the Scientists identify (up to 6 more), for a maximum of 12 points.
Cipher Example
Let’s say the Alien sends a cipher score of –4:
- Since the score is negative, one of the letters must be the Suspicion letter. They can cross off all other letters in the Suspicion section of their console.
- If the score had been odd, they could have crossed off those letters in the Amplify section since Amplify letters always double the score.
- If the score were 0, they’d know none of the letters are Trust letters.
Team vs. Team Mode
In this mode, each side has an Alien and one or more Scientists, and both Aliens use the same cipher. Teams take turns sending and scoring clues over three rounds.
At the end, each side guesses the other’s message and scores separately. The team with the higher total wins.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- What I like most about A Message From The Stars is that it is fun to play both roles. I was worried that I’d like being a Scientist a lot more since you get to talk with your teammates throughout, but that wasn’t the case. Working together as the Scientists to figure out what the cipher scores mean is a blast, but it’s equally fun trying to come up with great clues as the Alien.
- Using the consoles to work through your deductions is a genuinely fun and pretty unique co-op minigame. There’s something very satisfying about crossing off letters, narrowing down your possibilities, and slowly zeroing in on the right ones.
- It’s cool that they have a cipher helper for this game in the Allplay app. I like that groups have that option if they need help with the cipher scores.
- The messages themselves are usually a funny, Mad Libs–style way to end the game.
- Each game uses a different set of cipher letters, giving it pretty high replayability. On top of that, the three words on the message cards are randomized, so the odds of getting the same setup twice are very low.
- The dry-erase markers work better than most. They’re fine-tipped and the ink erases cleanly off the boards and cards.
- I’m obviously mostly interested in playing this as a co-op, but I like having the option to play it as a team game. A few people I know prefer competitive games, and I think this can satisfy both crowds.
Cons
- You definitely can run into some quarterbacking issues on the Scientists’ side if one or more players are better at this type of deduction than the rest.
- The deduction in A Message From The Stars is mostly math-based. That won’t be a con for everyone, but it won’t be for everyone and it might throw some people off who were expecting a more traditional “word” game.
- There can be some downtime while players come up with clues. There’s even more downtime in larger groups where everyone is trying to weigh in when figuring out what the cipher scores mean.
- The plastic message card stands cover up two of the middle words on the card. I feel like they could have worked around that.
Final Thoughts
I think most of the cooperative word games that have come out in recent years have been unique and good, and that’s also how I’d describe A Message From The Stars. It took us a minute to wrap our heads around the cipher scoring, but once we got past that we all had a blast trying to figure out what each clue meant. Downtime was an issue a couple of times for us when the Scientists were coming up with clues, but it wasn’t too bad.
I don’t know if I’d want to play the co-op mode with more than four players since I just don’t think you need that many Scientists, but it definitely plays well at three and four players. It could be a great game for some groups of two players, but I think most people will prefer it with more so they can bounce ideas and solutions off of each other.
The closest comp that I can think of for this game is Letter Jam since they both combine word association with slightly advanced deduction. I like them pretty much equally, but A Message From The Stars is a bit more straightforward and less brain-hurty, so I know I can get more people to play it.
If you’re a fan of word games and deduction games, I think you’ll have a great time playing A Message From The Stars, especially if everyone in your group is on roughly the same level when it comes to deduction.
A Message From The Stars Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
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