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What if humanity didn’t just understand entropy, but actually learned how to control it? That’s the idea behind Entropy. In the game, players take on the role of apprentice scientists taking part in a final examination inside a giant simulation chamber. Your task is to create stars, form planets, build ecosystems, and eventually develop life across your own collection of solar systems.
Of course, creating a few planets isn’t enough. The interesting part is how everything connects. Stars influence the conditions available in a solar system, those conditions determine which lifeforms can survive, and every addition opens up new possibilities elsewhere. While you’re busy building your own corner of the galaxy, the other players are trying to do exactly the same thing, competing for objectives and looking for the most efficient way to develop their simulations.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 90-150 minutes
📝 Designers: Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani & Nestore Mangone
🎨 Artwork: Piotr Orleański & Zbigniew Umgelter
🏢 Publisher: Board&Dice (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Entropy is an engine-building eurogame where you’re gradually building and developing your own collection of solar systems. Throughout the game, you’ll add stars, planets, asteroids, biomes, and lifeforms to your tableau, turning a few empty worlds into complex ecosystems that generate resources, rewards, and victory points.
The game is played over a variable number of rounds. On your turn, you’ll move your scientist one to three spaces around a circular action wheel and perform the action where you stop. Many of the actions on the inner ring require you to place a matching creation token. Those tokens stay on the board until you pass them later in the game, at which point you can retrieve them for bonuses such as entropy or star activations.
You’ll spend much of the game creating and developing stars. New stars can be added to your solar systems, while existing stars can be evolved into stronger versions by spending energy. As stars advance through their different tiers, their abilities improve and they provide additional effects.
Planets are acquired by spending mass. They can be added to an existing solar system or used to start a completely new one. Every planet provides an immediate effect when acquired and contributes different environmental conditions that help support future life.
Life cards can be played onto planets, but only if the required conditions are present. These conditions are represented by heat, carbon, water, and radiation, which come from the stars, planets and asteroids within your solar systems. Life develops through three stages: bacteria, plants, and animals. More advanced lifeforms generally provide stronger effects and can contribute to several scoring opportunities.
Stars can be activated in two different ways. You can activate them when retrieving creation tokens, or by taking the dedicated activate stars action and spending entropy. Their effects vary quite a bit, providing resources, lifeform advancement, cards, victory points, and other useful bonuses.
Planets can be developed further by adding biomes. These provide recurring bonuses linked to specific actions and can be fulfilled once the planet contains the required lifeforms, improving their rewards. Another way to develop your tableau is by upgrading your console. This strengthens the focus cards connected to your creation tokens, providing additional benefits whenever those tokens are used.
At the end of each turn, you’ll check for completed missions and objectives. Missions are personal goals that provide immediate rewards, while shared objectives and lifeform objectives reward players for developing specific aspects of their simulation.
The game ends once any combination of two major objectives has been completed, whether that’s through the main objectives or the large lifeform objectives. Players finish the current round, play one final round, and then move to scoring. Victory points come from objective progress, claimed lifeform objectives, points earned during play, and leftover resources. The player with the highest total score wins.
Components & Art
Let’s get the obvious part out of the way first: Entropy looks great on the table.
The game goes for colourful science fiction, with bright stars, unusual lifeforms, and planets covered in strange environments. It feels scientific enough to support the theme without becoming cold or overly technical. By the end of a game, the table is usually filled with stars, planets, asteroids, and lifeforms spread across several solar systems. It’s the kind of game that tends to attract a few curious looks from people walking past the table.
There is a lot in the box, but the production largely feels like what you’d hope for from a modern eurogame. The cardboard is sturdy, the board is easy to read, and the wooden lifeform pieces are a nice touch. Using different shapes for bacteria, plants, and animals makes it much easier to understand the state of a planet at a glance.
The iconography is worth mentioning as well because there is quite a lot of it. During the first game you’ll almost certainly be checking references from time to time, but we found most of the symbols logical and consistent. After a while they started to become second nature, which is important in a game with this many interconnected systems.
The only thing that might put some players off initially is the amount of information on the table. Between the central board, player consoles, resources, cards, planets, stars, asteroids, and everything else, the setup can look a little intimidating. I mean, if somebody walked past during setup, they could be forgiven for thinking you were preparing a small-scale astronomy project rather than a board game. Fortunately, once the game starts and everything has a purpose, it becomes much easier to read than that first impression suggests.
Accessibility & Complexity
Entropy isn’t difficult because individual rules are particularly complicated. Most actions are actually quite straightforward. The challenge comes from understanding how all the different systems connect and recognising which opportunities are worth pursuing. I’d comfortably place it in the medium-heavy eurogame category. Players who regularly enjoy modern eurogames should settle in without too much trouble, while newer players may need a game or two before everything starts making sense.
What makes the first play a little tougher isn’t the rules themselves, but understanding why everything matters. You’re not just taking actions. You’re setting up future actions, creating conditions for life cards, developing planets, progressing objectives, and slowly building an engine that only really starts to reveal itself after a few rounds. The first game can also feel slightly opaque from a scoring perspective. There are quite a few ways to earn points, and until you’ve seen final scoring once or twice, it can be difficult to judge whether you’re actually doing well or simply doing things that feel productive.
The listed playtime of 90 to 150 minutes felt accurate in our games. Since players influence when the game ends, some sessions will naturally move faster than others. Even so, once you include the teach, I’d definitely plan for a full evening rather than expecting a quick game. Entropy is the kind of game that asks players to settle in for a while, and honestly, I think that’s exactly what it’s aiming for.
One thing I really appreciated is the rulebook. There’s a lot to explain, but it does a very good job of introducing concepts in a logical order. Examples appear where they’re actually useful, and finding a specific rule later on is surprisingly easy. We had very few rules questions during our plays, which is usually one of the best compliments I can give a rulebook.
The player aids are genuinely useful as well and spent most of our first few games sitting right next to our boards. Near the back of the rulebook you’ll find an appendix covering mission cards, main objectives, and animal cards, while the final page contains a complete iconography reference. Both proved helpful throughout our games and saved us from endlessly flipping through the book looking for answers.
Theme & Atmosphere
Space is hardly a rare theme in board games, but Entropy approaches it from a slightly different angle. You’re not exploring the galaxy. You’re building it.
When I first read the premise, I wasn’t entirely sure how much of that theme would survive once the optimisation started. After all, this is still a eurogame. But I was pleasantly surprised by how often the theme remained visible during play. The game isn’t trying to be a scientific simulation, and I think that’s the right approach. It borrows ideas from astronomy, ecosystems, and evolution, then uses them to create an interesting framework for the gameplay. You don’t need a background in astrophysics to understand what’s happening, but the theme still feels connected to the decisions you’re making.
What worked particularly well for us is that you can actually see your progress on the table. By the end of a game, your tableau tells a story of how your systems developed. One player may have focused on a handful of highly developed planets, while another has spread life across several solar systems. It’s still a eurogame at heart, so don’t expect a narrative experience, but compared to many eurogames where the theme could be replaced without changing much, Entropy does a surprisingly good job of making its setting feel relevant from start to finish.
Gameplay & Flow
The action wheel ended up being one of the parts we talked about most after our first few plays. At first glance, it looks fairly straightforward. You move your scientist, choose an action, and carry on. It took us a little while to realise that the creation tokens are really where many of the interesting decisions start appearing. Since those tokens stay on the wheel until you eventually pass them again, you’re often thinking beyond the current turn. Quite regularly, the question wasn’t just “What do I need right now?”, but also “Where do I want to be in two or three turns?” That gives the game a planning element that feels different from simply choosing the strongest action available.
What we also noticed is that Entropy becomes more enjoyable once the various systems start connecting with one another. Early on, it can feel as though you’re juggling a lot of separate mechanisms. You’re creating stars, developing planets, collecting resources, checking objectives, upgrading focus cards, managing life cards, and trying to understand how everything fits together. The game becomes much smoother once those connections start making sense. Suddenly you’re not thinking about individual systems anymore. You’re thinking about how one action helps support three others later on.
The overall turn structure helps keep things manageable. Every turn follows the same basic sequence, even when your options become much broader later in the game. That consistency prevents the game from becoming overwhelming, despite the number of systems involved. At the same time, Entropy does ask players to be patient. Many actions are investments that only become valuable later. That worked well at our table because it made the development of our engines feel rewarding, but players who prefer more immediate payoffs may find the opening stages a little slower than they would like.
Strategy & Luck
One thing became obvious fairly quickly: there is always more to do than you have time to do. Entropy constantly presents players with opportunities, and a big part of the challenge is deciding which ones deserve your attention. Every action spent pursuing one goal is an action you’re not spending somewhere else, so you quickly realise you can’t develop everything equally. The game often felt less about finding a perfect move and more about choosing between several good options.
Objectives, missions, available cards, and tile availability all influence the direction of a game. We found ourselves adapting to what was happening on the table far more often than following a fixed plan from the opening turn. In that sense, Entropy rewards flexibility. The game will suggest opportunities, but it’s up to you to decide which ones are worth pursuing and which ones you’re willing to ignore.
What surprised us most is how important stars became over time. When learning the game, planets and life cards naturally draw most of the attention, but stars influence a huge part of what you’re able to do. They provide conditions, activations, engine development, and scoring opportunities. After a few plays, they felt less like a supporting system and more like one of the foundations of the entire game. Biomes were another system that grew on us. Early on, they can look like a nice little bonus. Later, once you start fulfilling them consistently, their recurring benefits become much more noticeable.
We also liked how the focus upgrades encouraged different priorities between players. They aren’t the most visible part of the game, but they can shape how your engine develops over the course of a session.
Player Interaction
For the most part, everyone is focused on building their own systems as efficiently as possible. That doesn’t mean the other players are irrelevant, though. Objectives create the biggest source of competition. Seeing somebody move toward a goal you’re also interested in can force you to change your priorities surprisingly quickly. There is also competition for cards, planets, biomes, and certain opportunities on the board, which means you can’t completely ignore what the rest of the table is doing.
The balance felt right to us. We always paid attention to other players, but we never felt as though somebody could completely ruin our plans. Players who enjoy highly confrontational games may wish there was more direct interaction, while players who prefer building their own engine without constant disruption will probably appreciate the approach.
Pacing & Replayability
One thing we liked is that the length of the game feels largely driven by the players themselves. Since the endgame is triggered through objective progress, the pace can vary depending on how efficiently everyone is developing their systems. In some games, it felt as though we still had plenty left we wanted to do when the end approached. In others, players were clearly pushing toward the finish line. Either way, it meant we paid attention not just to our own plans, but also to how quickly the objectives were progressing around the table.
As for replayability, I think Entropy has quite a lot going for it. Different objectives, missions, planets, biomes, life cards, and setup combinations ensure that games don’t unfold exactly the same way. More importantly, we regularly finished games with ideas we wanted to try next time. Maybe we had ignored a particular objective, underestimated a certain strategy, or simply wanted to see how a different approach would play out. That’s usually when I start believing a game has real staying power. Not that we’ve seen everything, but that we’re still curious about what else it can do.
Final Thoughts
Entropy ended up being one of those games we kept talking about after the table was packed away. Every session seemed to leave us with another idea we wanted to explore. We’d finish a game and immediately start discussing different objectives, different approaches, or things we’d overlooked. That’s usually a very good sign.
What stayed with us most wasn’t a particular mechanism or a single memorable moment. It was the way our priorities changed from one game to the next. The first game felt like we were learning lots of separate pieces. Later games felt very different. We weren’t thinking about stars, life cards, biomes, objectives, and focus upgrades as individual systems anymore. We were thinking about how one decision could influence several others further down the line. That’s where Entropy became most enjoyable.
For us, it is a really enjoyable eurogame to spend an evening with. It gave us plenty to think about, plenty to explore, and perhaps most importantly, it kept making us want to come back for another play.
📝 Board&Dice provided us with a review copy of Entropy.
