Wouter & Ymke 
In Celestia, you climb into a wooden flying machine and head off toward floating cities full of treasure. It sounds heroic. It feels heroic. And then the captain rolls the dice and you start doing maths in your head and watching their face at the same time.
Storms show up. Pirates appear. Strange birds attack. And there you are, sitting in a cardboard gondola, trying to decide if you trust the person next to you.
That’s really the whole game. Do you stay and hope they can handle it, or do you step off and take a smaller reward?
👥 2-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Aaron Weissblum
🎨 Artwork: Gaetan Noir
🏢 Publisher: BLAM! (Review copy provided by Geronimo Games)
Gameplay Overview
The setup is simple. Nine city tiles are placed in order from 1 to 25. Each city has its own small deck of treasure cards. The further you go, the higher the numbers get.
Everyone puts their pawn into the little airship. All the cards are shuffled together into one deck. You draw a starting hand. In a two or three player game, you get eight cards. With four to six players, you get six.
The goal is to reach at least 50 points in treasure. The game ends at the start of a new journey once someone crosses that line, and then you compare scores.
Each journey starts at the first city. One player is the captain. They roll a number of dice shown on the next city. The dice show hazards. Lightning, fog, birds, pirates, or sometimes nothing at all.
Each hazard requires a matching card from the captain’s hand. If two lightning appear, you need two lightning cards. No shortcuts. And here’s the important part. The captain cannot immediately play the cards.
First, the other players decide.
Starting from the left of the captain, each passenger says whether they stay on board or leave. If you leave, you take the top treasure card from the current city and you’re done for that journey. Safe points in your hand. If you stay, you’re trusting that the captain can pay the cost.
After everyone decides, some special cards can be played. These allow rerolls, forced ejections, or last second escapes. The timing rules are quite specific. I’ll be honest, in our first game we paused a couple of times to check who could play what and when. It’s not hard, but it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
Then the captain has to show the cards. If they have the required ones, they must play them. They’re not allowed to pretend they don’t. Turbo cards are optional, so at least there’s some flexibility there.
If the captain covers all the dice, the ship moves forward. If not, it crashes and everyone still on board gets nothing. And yes, that can sting a little.
When a journey ends, either by crash or by reaching the last city, everything resets. The ship goes back to city one. Everyone gets back on board. Each player draws one card. And you start again.
That’s the structure. It’s simple. Almost suspiciously simple.
Artwork and Components
Let’s take a moment and talk about that airship.
It’s three dimensional. It stands on a cloud. It has a big propeller. It’s slightly unnecessary and completely charming. I know it’s cardboard, but it really helps. When pawns sit inside the gondola, you feel like you’re in it together.
When someone leaves, they physically remove their pawn. When the ship crashes with three people still inside, you can see exactly who made the wrong call. It’s hard to hide behind the table at that point.
The city tiles are colourful and easy to read. Early cities look light and friendly. Later ones look darker. The symbols on the dice and cards are clear. You don’t need to explain icons for ten minutes, which is helpful when not everyone at the table speaks English as a first language.
It’s not overproduced. It doesn’t need to be. It looks good on the table and that’s enough.
Our Experience
What stood out most for us is how much this game is about watching people. The captain rolls the dice and everyone looks at them, not at the dice. A small pause. A quick “I think we’re fine.” That usually means we are not fine.
In our first games, people left early. Small guaranteed treasures just felt safer. No one wanted to be the one who stayed and walked away with nothing. But after a few crashes, we realised something. Crashing is not the end of the world. You reset quickly. You draw back up. The game moves on.
Once that fear faded, people started staying longer. The middle cities became more interesting. Decisions felt less about safety and more about timing.
There were turns where someone stayed one city too long and lost everything. And turns where someone stayed just long enough to grab a high value card and suddenly jump ahead. Those swings are fun when they go your way. Less fun when they don’t.
The special cards can mess with your plans. Sometimes in a fun way. Sometimes in a way that makes someone lean back in their chair and say, “Of course.” Especially if they get ejected just before a crash.
Also, if your group doesn’t talk much, the game can feel flatter. It really benefits from people reacting, commenting, bluffing a little. Otherwise it becomes a fairly straightforward probability exercise.
Our Thoughts
Celestia is a light push your luck game. Very light. I mean that neutrally. It doesn’t try to be deep strategy. It doesn’t try to simulate a complex adventure. It gives you one repeated decision and builds everything around that.
For us, that means it works best between heavier games, or with people who don’t want a long rules explanation.
What I like is how clear it is. More dice means more risk. Higher cities mean more points. That’s it. No hidden systems.
What I like less is how much a few turns can decide the outcome. If you prefer steady planning and long term control, this may feel thin. And if your group doesn’t lean into the social side, it can start to feel similar from round to round.
Still, when everyone at the table leans into it, it creates those small table stories you remember later. The time everyone stayed one step too long. The time someone trusted the wrong captain. The time you said, “I’m staying,” and immediately regretted it.
And yes, sometimes you stay one city too long because you trusted your friend. That’s not just a mechanic. That’s a reminder that maybe you shouldn’t trust Aaron when he says, “I’ve got this.”
In the end, Celestia doesn’t promise anything huge. It just asks you the same question again and again. Stay or leave. And honestly, that’s enough.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Geronimo Games.
