Superstore 3000 Components Overview and Impressions
Superstore 3000 from Space Cowboys landed on my desk a little while ago thanks to our friends at Asmodee Canada, and I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. Asmodee always reaches out before sending games and asks if I’m interested – I do appreciate this – but with Superstore 3000, I wasn’t sure exactly what I would be getting. Why did I say yes? It was a relatively short game (30-45 minutes) and was playable at my son’s age, 10+.
Out of the box, the components are really strong. This has been a trademark of Space Cowboys for a little while now, and I’m glad to see they are continuing with solid productions. The cardboard components – of which there are many – are really great. They punched out of the punch board nicely, and are durable when handled. You will be touching and moving these tiles alot in a single game, so I’m glad to see they are nice and thick and sturdy.
There are also a few cards in the game, and seeing as you won’t be shuffling or handling these cards almost ever, I was a bit shocked at how good they were. Space Cowboys could have easily gone with a much cheaper card, but opted not to – Kudos to them!
There are two featured components in this game, one I really like, and one I’ve come to hate. Let’s get the negative out of the way first. The game comes with a Dispenser 3000, a dual layered board where you will be placing a variety of mall tiles. As you select tiles, those remaining slide down and a new one is filled from the top.
In theory this should work really well, and I understand why they chose to add this into the box – in practice, however, I found the narrow opening to place tiles a bit hard to work with, and sliding the tiles down was a bit of a chore. The “walls” of the dual layered slots are not straight, and they cannot be. You need to be able to get a fingernail alongside the tile to lift it out. But because of that, edges get caught often when you attempt to slide tiles, and it became more of a chore over the course of several games.
The positive in the box are the little acrylic customers that will be moving throughout your mall. These customers all have unique prints on them, and are great to handle and look at. Honestly, your first few games might go slower than anticipated as players look over their tiny, albeit gorgeously detailed, small customers. The production on these is fabulous, and once again I couldn’t help but think that Space Cowboys could have used cardboard tokens if they wanted to. They went for a bit of pizazz, however, and I love it.
Overall, I think the component quality in this game is well above average. While I was not a huge fan of the dual layered dispensing board, everything else is top notch! Now to get this game played!