Friday night I got to play Space Dealer for the first time. I'd heard a bit about it before, but I was completely unprepared for the reality.

The basic premise is straightforward, and not that unusual. You have an area (your "planet") and a ship. The goal of the game is to develop your planet by adding cards to it that produce and manipulate various goods, and then ship those goods to other players' planets in exchange for victory points. Pretty standard, really. The game takes exactly half an hour to play (it comes with a CD with a music accompaniment and countdown, if you want).

The twist is in the action mechanism. Most cards have an action, something that they do. In order to use this action, you take one of your two sandtimers, flip it over and place it on the card. When it runs out, you can use that card. If you want to move your ship, you move it and place a sandtimer on/next to it. When it runs out, your ship has arrived. If you want to build a new card, you place the timer on it, etc. etc. The timers take about a minute to run out.

In the beginning of the game, everyone only has a few possible actions. So it's "flip, flip, wait. flip, flip, wait." But as things progress, the sceonds you take to consider your next move put you out of sync with the other players. Pretty soon, there's stuff going on all around, and those minutes will start to fly by. Except when they crawl, as you desperately shout, "Come on!" at your ship in the hopes of getting it to a destination before someone else can get there or the half hour runs out.

It's a weird game. It was fun, but the rules were kind of poorly translated, so it was halfway through the game before anyone really knew what they were doing, and there were a couple of details we didn't get at all until after we stopped and went back to the rulebook. The sandtimers were also a little flimsy, so they got knocked over occasionally. The owner of the game had also taken the trouble to mark them in pairs, which make it a lot easier to tell who owned each one. Ultimately, it fits neatly for me (as do so many games) into that category of "play again, but not spend any money on."