Twinkle Twinkle+ How I Wonder & Extraterrestrials Expansions Review—Decision space

I really wanted to like Kingdomino. The idea of draft-assembling a grid where picking up stronger tiles will put you later in the order for the next round was fascinating. But then I hit the dual problem of a scoring system I didn't love and its adoption of the ubiquitous medieval theme, so it's sat on my shelf collecting dust for the last few years. Enter Twinkle Twinkle, which wound up being exactly what I wanted from this sort of game.

One of the first things I noticed was how building your star chart to make it aesthetically pleasing naturally led to scoring well, so the human impulse to make pretty stuff has a symbiotic relationship with how the game wants to be played. That isn't to say scoring poorly will lead to an eyesore like in other tile laying games; Twinkle Twinkle has you dropping translucent tiles on your 4x5 star chart's stellar landscape like analog photoshop layers, so at worst you’ll get something that looks like a  postcard that a toddler put too many stickers on.

After playing enough, the thing that made Twinkle Twinkle really shine finally dawned on me. In a lot of these continuing draft order games, last pick winds up being a hole that is almost impossible to get out of, but here there's multiple mechanics in place to mitigate that. When pulling tiles between rounds to set up the next round display, some high value tiles will have a clock icon on them and get sent to the last available space, making sliding into last appealing all the more often. Similarly, the current round's offering has n+1 tiles with the leftover taking first position for next round, meaning taking first comes with the compromise of last round's reject tile.

Throw in the option to score objects in the straightforward basic mode or the more crunchy but never brain burning advanced mode, and Ammon's given us another game you can pull off the shelf and toss in front of anyone.

Now that those base-game plebs are gone, we can talk about the expansions, starting with the Extraterrestrials mini-expansion. I've bought more than my fair share of promos and mini-expansions, and they're almost always underwhelming, so I was steeling myself to need to get a bit mean seeing we got a copy of one. Thankfully enough, it proved to be a masterclass in how you can do a whole lot with a little. When playing with UFO objects, you'll slap one of each other object's tiles onto their accompanying board and whoever you draft one, you'll drop a token that'll make one of those other objects worth an extra point. Whoever got the most UFOs also gets an extra 8 points during scoring, so you've got this push and pull of UFOs not being worth much on their own but you'll want them to have control over which tiles get the extra points, especially if you've wound up with a lot of one object. The end result is massive strategic implications and tightened player interaction from one feature without it being overbearing, so I don't know how I could ask for more. 

How I Wonder does what a full expansion for this sort of game should do: drops in 5 new objects that shake up how you build your chart and give you a little more control over the game.  Wormholes let you reset two tiles in next round's market, and galaxies do the same for a tile on your board. Rockets and Nebulas re-emphasize stars, and moons do the same for planets. I like what's going on in here, but I would've liked a menu of recommended object sets. I know it's a nitpick, but after playing my fair share of random setups, some have felt underwhelming. Now that I've played with the expansion enough I can anticipate certain combinations not working and redraw, but I'm confused why there isn't a suggested setup or two to make sure y'all can acclimate without hitting the bumps in the road.