Not Because It Is Easy
On One Small Step, a midnight solo session, and games worth recommending before you finish them
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We choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. - John F. Kennedy
It was last weekend and it was past midnight. I hadn’t finished the game.
I stopped, not because I was losing (I genuinely wasn’t sure about that either), but because the clock said so. The unofficial solo variant I had pulled from BoardGameGeek was working, the system was clicking, and still I had to put it away.
I already knew I was going to recommend this game.
The thing that made me buy it
One Small Step had been sitting on my shelf for a while. The problem: it’s a two-player game. Two-player games are harder to schedule than they look. You need exactly one other person, available, interested, and ready to commit two hours. A 2v2 team mode exists, but that’s the same problem: now you need three other people to align. In my experience, that person, or those people, are almost never available at the same time.
So the box waited.
What made me buy it in the first place: the theme. The space race. USA against the USSR, both pouring resources into missions that were equal parts science and geopolitical theater. The components (astronaut cards, rocket launches, mission patches from programs that actually existed) do something to me. I grew up with those images. They’re iconic in a way that hasn’t faded.
What I found inside
The multi-use cards are the mechanic I want to talk about. Every astronaut card, every event, can serve a double function: act as an action space when played on the board, or generate resources when kept in hand or placed on your personal tableau. That’s a clean design decision. It creates real choices without adding noise.
The danger cards are my favorite touch. Every satellite launch, every crewed mission, carries the risk of failure. The tension is real, and it should be. These things went wrong constantly in the 1960s. Engineers and astronauts managing risk they couldn’t fully calculate, with lives on the line. The game gives you a fraction of that weight. Thematically, it earns it.
What I’m not sure about yet
One incomplete session is not enough to settle some questions. Possible repetitiveness. Runaway winner dynamics. Whether dominant strategies emerge and flatten the experience over time. Mind you, these are hypotheses, not verdicts. I need more plays.
What reassures me: there’s a mini expansion inside the box. It focuses on the women mathematicians whose calculations made the missions possible, the ones who rarely make it into the highlight reel. There’s a film about some of them, Hidden Figures, that I love. A few of those women are in the expansion. The expansion could add exactly the variability I’m wondering about. And I’ll be glad to put them on the table.
Who should play this
If you love historical games. If the space race interests you as a subject, not just as backdrop. If worker placement with specialized workers is your kind of puzzle, then One Small Step deserves a session.
And if you’re a solo player who rarely has a reliable two-player partner: the BGG variant works. I didn’t finish mine but I’ll be back.
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In September 1962, John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University and told about 40,000 people: “We choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
I quote that line more than I probably should. Lately I’ve been repeating it to my daughter, around smaller things: school, trying something new and getting it wrong, choosing the harder path. The idea that difficulty is a reason to do something, not a reason to avoid it.
One Small Step won’t ask anything heroic from you. But it did ask me to sit down past midnight with an unfinished game and already be sure it was worth it.
Have you ever recommended a game before you finished your first session?
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