Month: June 2023

Planet is all about arranging continents to maximize your objective’s Natural Habitat while hosting as much animal life as possible. There are twelve turns, each with a corresponding pile of face-down Continent tiles and face-up Animal cards. In those twelve turns, players fully develop their Planets, and compete to claim species!

To start, each player gets an empty Planet core and a random Natural Habitat card, which will determine their objective. Each has its own scale for points, depending on how much of that habitat exists on the Continent tiles. Of the five Habitats, oceans are most prevalent, while glaciers are rarest, so the thresholds are higher for someone with an ocean objective to win points. Each turn, that round’s five Continent tiles will be spread face-up on the board, and starting with the First Player, everyone will take one tile and add it to their Planet. To facilitate the 3D aspect of assembling a world, Planet cores are, effectively, blank magnetic d12s, which I think is awesome! The First Player token does pass at the end of the round, so everyone gets an even amount of first picks.

For the first two rounds, there are no Animal cards to compete for. From round three onward, however, after Continents are placed, players compare that Animal’s criteria to see who wins the card. There are a few categories of criteria, and some terminology to explain it: an Area is a single triangle of Habitat, of which each tile has five, while a Region is a contiguous collection of Areas of the same Habitat. In the picture above, for instance, there are two visible ocean Regions, each a single Area in size. For some Animals, this is ideal – they develop on the Planet with the most distinct Regions of a Habitat, regardless of their size. Other animals are drawn to the biggest Region of one kind, which must either be adjacent to or in no way adjacent to another specific Habitat. The Octopus belongs to the largest ocean Region touching mountains, while the Shark requires the largest ocean Region that doesn’t touch mountains. Having both in the same game was interesting.

That’s the other thing about Animals: whereas setup uses all fifty Continent tiles, there are only twenty of the forty-five Animal cards in play, so from game to game your objectives will vary a lot!

When the twelfth turn is over, each player counts how many Areas of their objective Habitat they’ve acquired, and receives the corresponding number of points. Then, they score the Animals! Each animal from the same Natural Habitat as their objective is worth one point, while each animal from another Habitat is worth two. As such, the game becomes a balancing act between collecting your Habitat, and diversifying enough to win the other Animals!

I immediately liked this game. I love the 3D aspect, the spatial puzzle, the challenge of juggling multiple objectives, the animals… we only really had one complaint, which is that the objective cards should have text or symbols (like each Area has, if you look closely at the tiles) so players don’t have to rely so much on color to know what their target Habitat is. We may have mistaken the ocean’s blue for glaciers, the first time, not having seen the white glacier card before. And nobody in our house is colorblind. Aside from that, though, it’s fantastic! I look forward to playing it again.

Some dear friends introduced me to the Mapominoes series of games, which are, aptly named, effectively dominoes but with maps. There are several maps to choose from! We played Africa, Europe, and Asia & Australasia, and since those continents connect, they also have mechanics in place to play them all together. Some of the others, like the UK Counties and US States, probably don’t have the option to interconnect, but the gameplay is entertaining nonetheless.

The whole deck of countries (or states or counties) is split between the players, and each player will get a certain number of transit cards, as dictated by that variant’s rules. On their turns, players place one card, which must border every other card it touches. For instance, Switzerland can go next to Germany, but not Belgium, because Switzerland and Belgium don’t share a border in real life. Because each card only has four sides, and some countries have more or less than four neighbors, the map will very quickly devolve to looking nothing like the real deal.

Some cards share borders with a body of water, i.e. Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, or France, which borders the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. Some cards, like Madagascar, only share borders with a body of water. This is where transit cards come in. Transit is a bit like a wild card, able to act as any country or body of water. However, unlike wild cards in other games, the place the transit card is substituting must be declared as it’s played, and every card adjacent to it both then and after must share a border with the place it represents. As a result, you may wind up with multiple cards representing the same location at once – in the photo below, we functionally had two Tanzania cards. This only adds to the chaos of the map. This is also why different continents have players start with a different amount of transit cards – if you’re playing Asia & Australasia, you’re going to have a lot more island nations than if you’re playing Europe.

Transit cards or not, there comes a point when playing your cards is impossible. Perhaps the one open space next to South Africa is boxed in by other cards, and you can’t play Swaziland. Perhaps that space would be open, but you’ve reached the edge of the table, which by the rules of the game is “the edge of the world” and cannot be played past. Regardless, you must instead draw a transit card, and play passes on. When someone manages to play all their country cards, they win!

I’ve already mentioned how chaotic the layout of the resulting map is. There’s also a lot of room for adjusting the game’s difficulty, depending on the space you play it in. On the living room floor? You’re less likely to hit space constraints than if you’re playing on, say, a coffee table. And of course it’s educational! This one’s an all-around win for me.