Fractured Sky Review

Fractured Sky from IV Studio is coming back to Kickstarter with a reprint and an expansion on April 30, and the company was nice enough to send me the Super Deluxe version of the game to review on the website. We’ve already talked about all the components and what you can expect there, so let’s talk about the turn-to-turn gameplay and see whether this is right for you.

In Fractured Sky, players will be placing air ships, buildings and more onto the central board in order to out-rank their opponents and gain resources and starfall that equate to victory points. Players take an action on their turn which ranges from placing an airship with a value beneath it, spending resources to build fortresses, markets or skimmers which will give them bonuses on certain sky islands, and more.

Each round, an increasing number of hidden star shard locations will be laid out face down, and players will need to have the most value in points beneath their airships (plus their various bonuses) to out maneuver their enemies and obtain the shard. I did say they were hidden though, so you either need a good amount of luck, or some decent deduction skills.

See, throughout the round, players can use actions to look at these face down cards to see where a star shard might be hidden that round, and then they have the option to choose a resource from that location. Once they choose a resource, it will provide a bit of evidence for all other players – for example, if the star shard location has wood on it that you took as a reward, everyone at the table knows that at least one secret star shard location has wood. There are also hidden objective cards that come into play at the end of each round with one being revealed and scored, with the winning person getting another starfall.

With the ability to take one action on your turn – build, deploy, or look at hidden information – there is quite a bit of decision making in what you should do and when? Want to be the first to land on a sky island with your airship? That’s all fine and dandy, but if you don’t have information on some of the hidden starfall cards, how do you know where to go? But if you look at the hidden information card, what if you reveal too much information and someone else gets to the location you originally wanted? And when should you build!

All of these decisions have purpose and consequences, both negative and positive. I enjoy a game where each and every decision matters. And since the game is nicely broken into 5 rounds, a poor decision you make one round is likely not going to impact what happens on a future round since the hidden starfall locations are reset.

The decision space isn’t just limited on when you should do certain things either. The build action, for example, gives you access to three different build able items: the fortress, the market, and the skimmer. The fortress will give you an additional troop value in a connected region, which could be the difference between winning or losing at a location. Markets provide additional resources to players, key for building more stuff; and skimmers give you a temporary +1 in the location they are built in, although are returned to the player at the end of the round.

What i love most about Fractured Sky is how easy it is to learn, and how cleanly it plays. Every turn feels like something good is happening to you – even when you lose out on a Starfall you might get a resource or two, or perhaps you are going to accomplish an objective, or any number of other things. You always feel like you are progressing, and that’s pretty important for me.

But I cannot gloss over the simplicity of how it all works. This isn’t an easy game, not a lightweight game in any way. But IV Studio has this great ability to create really deep and strong games with simple to understand mechanics. And Fractured Sky, in my opinion, falls into this category – it’s easy to teach, it’s easy to learn, and in honesty it is easy to play. It’s the strategic elements of it all that really take this into that medium weight territory, which I think is the fastest growing area of the board game industry.

This is coming back to Kickstarter on April 30th, so if you want to get your hands on the Super Deluxe version of the game, that is the time to do it. In our opinion, though, this is a fantastic game of hidden information, resources management, and area control – it’s easily one of the best games I’ve played in 2024, and I cannot wait to play it some more!