Zenith makes a strong first impression before you even touch a card. It’s bright and cheerful in a way sci-fi games rarely are, usually they’re leaning into the darkness of space to inform their aesthetic, see Beyond the Sun or Race for the Galaxy for examples. Zenith though, reminds me of Lilo and Stitch. Colourful planets, charming little alien creatures, and white clinical backgrounds give this sci-fi affair a more optimistic feel.

A Tug-of-war game for 2 or 4 players, Zenith by designers Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel has players vying for control over 5 planets. On your turn you’ll play a card to do one of 3 things. Either discard it to move up a tech track matching the suit of the card you discarded, discard it to take a diplomacy action, giving you the leadership seal, which increases your hand limit and provides you with a small amount of resources, or play the card to the tracks, which will always move a disc toward you, and then often will have a secondary effect to resolve. The game ends when someone gets 5 planet discs to their side of the board, or 4 differently coloured discs, or 3 discs of the same colour.

The first thing I noticed about Zenith was the abundance of iconography. There are a lot of symbols, and while the reference card covers the basics, it doesn’t quite prepare you for every possible combination the cards throw at you. It’s never impossible to decipher, but I did have to use the hover-over text on Board Game Arena more often than not to be sure of what a card would exactly do before playing it. I would have really appreciated it if the rulebook had a glossary of cards with the plain language rules. That would have gone a long way in helping me through my first few turns.

While the box says 2 or 4 players, Zenith is clearly a two-player game at heart. Yes, it technically supports four, but the four-player mode feels like the designers stretching the system past where it wants to go. The box advertises a “tug-of-war strategy game,” and that’s exactly what it delivers. You and your opponent will trade off sliding discs back and forth, getting certain discs closer and closer to your zone until someone plays an unexpected card and manages to push the disc off the ledge.

Image Credit: Trident Job (@trident_Job) via BGG

The tug-of-war works here because turns are so clean and quick. You’re usually doing one of three things: play a card and pay for it to move some discs, discard a card to get some resources, or move up a track paying a different currency to gain bonuses. It’s a simple turn structure that manages to generate some interesting decisions. There’s a wonderful push-and-pull between choosing to expanding your hand size (huge in this game), building discount engines, and progressing the discs you actually want to claim for yourself, or preventing your opponent from claiming a disc too easily.

And because it’s a two-player duel, the meanness feels just right. You can steal cards which give discounts to cards of the same colour, exile your own tableau to reposition, and even yank planets away at the last second. This is where tug-of-war games usually lose me. Hurting your opponent always directly advances your own cause, and nothing ever feels unrecoverable. It feels more like a war of attrition and undoing what your opponent did on their turn instead of both players working towards an end game condition.

There is some significant luck in the card draw, and it really does matter. Sometimes you really need one specific type of card, an animal to finish off that tech track, or any blue card to just get that disc over the final line, and the deck just says “nope.” When your hand size is only four or five, that can sting. But managing your hand is a big part of the game. Especially when your opponent steals the leadership emblem, and you don’t get to draw new cards until you play some that were sitting in your hand. Taking that leadership token back will expand your hand size again, and you’ll get to draw two cards, but if you don’t have a card ability that gives you the leadership emblem, spending a whole turn to take it back really feels suboptimal.

The tech track can offer some useful abilities, and when you move up a tech track, you get the benefits of everything below it again, but there’s no persistent benefit for moving up the tracks. It’s the kind of thing where you need to be in the right position, then utilize the tech track for a big move that pushes one of the discs over the threshold. It’s fine, but I wish it did reward players in a more persistent fashion. Like if you hit the top of the robots track, now all robots cost 2 resources less to play.

For all its colour, charm, and clever little systems, Zenith ultimately sits outside the kind of experience I’m looking for. It has more going on than a Lost Cities-weight game, yet somehow feels less like it’s building toward anything. Where games like Lost Cities or Air, Land & Sea create this wonderful sense of escalation, slowly tightening the screws as each card nudges the tension higher, Zenith often feels like a stalemate of small reversals, waiting for the right tool to finally appear in your hand.

And that’s really the heart of it for me: tug-of-war games just don’t give me the payoff I want. Trading blows back and forth, undoing each other’s progress, watching discs shuffle the same few spaces back and forth, it’s not the kind of gameplay arc that excites me. I can admire the production, the vibrant personality in the art, and even the flashes of tactical cleverness, but I never quite feel that satisfying crescendo I get from the two-player games I love. That said, if tug-of-war tension is your favourite flavour, if you enjoy tight, interactive duels where every push has an immediate pull, Zenith might land far better for you. It’s well-designed, aesthetically delightful, and offers plenty of room for smart plays.