Lux Aeterna
This is yet another game that I got a few years ago and, yet again, not even opened the box to see what was inside.
I asked on Twitter (when it was good) for a quick setup and play solo game in a small box and the overwhelming consensus was Lux Aeterna. Seconds to setup and minutes to play, all the while being tense with loads of decision making to do against a ticking clock and sucking black hole.
Your ship has sustained massive damage, is falling apart around you, and is drifting toward the ultimate catastrophe, a black hole. You are alone.
Your challenge in Lux Aeterna is to draw and play all of the cards in the main deck, one turn after another, without the spaceship collapsing completely or falling into the black hole. Cards have multiple functions; you will assign drawn cards to one each of these functions each turn:
- As damage to a system (with six systems available to you);
- As an action to help stay alive/fix the ship; or,
- As movement toward the black hole.
If a ship’s system collapses, the game will get harder for you; if you should repair a system, then you just might avoid the ultimate doom.
Events (called “glitches”) can be seeded into the main deck to make things even more difficult, as will reducing the real time that you have to play: 12 minutes -> 10 minutes -> 8 minutes, etc.
So, I’ve added this to the Board Game Challenge 2026 and after watching a couple of playthroughs and reading the rules a couple of times I felt confident to get it out of its packaging and set about playing another new game.
The box contents are:
- 1 Black Hole Proximity Track
- 1 Console card
- 1 Play Aid card
- 6 Glitch cards
- 1 ERR Glitch card
- 30 System cards
- 60 Main deck cards
- 6 6-sided dice
- 1 Starship piece
- 1 Starting Position Marker
This looked simple enough from the videos and the rules were quite straightforward, but…
This requires a lot of thought from the get go as you’re never far away from a system collapse with your dice starting on two.
Since you’re also being timed there feels like a lot of pressure to make the best choices as quickly as possible and an unfamiliarity with the cards and outcomes didn’t help but I think the shorter time limit you give yourself to play in would really help to ramp up the tension whether you knew the cards a lot or not.
It seemed to be going quite well at the start and I actually got rid of all the glitch cards from the deck quite rapidly without having to suffer any penalties apart from getting closer to the black hole.
But concentrating on that left most of my systems at one, so when one went that turned the only other high dice to a one, then the system went that took another system with it and that was me done in two turns.
I can see how much replayability is in this game due to the multiple systems, glitches, and deck cards having so many possibilities of set up and outcomes.
Looking forward to catching a quick ten minute game eventually, but will stick with the fifteen minute easy mode for a while until I get used to playing.
