Cryo starts with a disaster. A mission gone wrong. A colony ship crash landing onto a desolate, frozen planet. The ship utterly broken with crew in cryostasis pods strewn about the mountainside. Players take on the role of separate, hostile factions, competing to accrue resources and shuttle their tribes stasis pods into the nearby caverns before the sun sets and everything left on the surface is lost to the unsurvivable cold.

The actions you take are via drones, flying off your personal player board and landing on the various docks around the planet, either gaining or consuming resources to gain other benefits, such as better resources, energy, cards, or resource chips that you can slot into your player board to create your own resource generation spots that get activated when you recall your drones.

At its heart, Cryo is about sending drones out to collect resources and recalling them to trigger bonuses and upgrades, gradually transforming your platform into a more efficient rescue operation. The game is medium weight in complexity, there are only 4 resources, and 4 main sections where you can place your workers. Half the actions on the board do the same thing, just in different locations, and the other half of the actions convert one of the 3 main resources into the other 2 special resources, or cards. The section off to the right is a bit special in what it can do, but even it all makes sense after just a minute of explanation. Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, the setup feels unnecessarily fiddly for a medium-weight euro: separating sunset tokens, organizing player-count-based stacks of resource chips, and sorting multiple tile types adds an early layer of tedium that contrasts with the otherwise smooth turns.

Unlike many other engine building point scoring eurogames, Cryo has a distinct arc. You aren’t swelling and deflating with resources like a pufferfish. Instead, the whole game has you shuffling your cubes up and down in service of slowly shuttling the pods containing your crew into the caverns. The majority of your points will come from that, both from just existing underground, and from the area majority aspect of the caves.

Cryo is probably the perfect name for the game, because the pacing can feel glacial. One of the things I complained about when reviewing Rajas of the Ganges, was that I get annoyed when the growth of an engine is just trading one resource for 2 others. Giving up a green resource to earn a pink and a grey resource is not what I find exciting in a board game. Cryo , is a little better than Rajas in doling out bonus resources that enable you to take just one extra action before needing to recall, but it’s a tiny step forward that still leaves me a bit frustrated.

As I said, Cryo has a distinct arc. At first, you’ll spend your time playing cards as upgrades to give you a bit of a leg up, and you’ll take the resource tokens from the main board and slot them into the little formulas on your player board, so when you recall your drones, you can activate those resource conversions. Then, later on during the game, you really need to focus on playing your cards as ships, dismantling those formulas you built earlier in the game for a bonus resource, and shuttling full loads of your workers into the underground. You aren’t doing the same thing at the end of the game as you were doing at the beginning of the game.

The production of Cryo is pretty excellent. The dual layer player boards help players see how to build their platform, the plastic drones stack together very satisfyingly (although there’s never a reason to stack the drones). The art direction is excellent, with thick lines and flat pastel colours, I’m reminded of landscapes of Moebius’ sci-fi comic strips, or Scavengers Reign. The premise of the game should be applauded too. Instead of the same old boring story of economics and wealth generation, we’re treated to a bit of a sci-fi struggle. A tiny bit of tension, pushing you to get your pods underground before the sun sets, is something I enjoy much more than the generic game plot of earning money for the sake of earning money.

There’s nothing wrong with Cryo, but also nothing that makes me want to return. It’s a solid game with a cool theme and competent design, but in a hobby packed with engine-builders, Cryo doesn’t give me a reason to reach for it again. If someone eagerly brought it to the table, I’d play. But it’s not one I’ll be suggesting anytime soon.