Planet is a game in which players build up the ecosystems of their planets by placing magnetic tiles on a 3D “Planet core.” The game is divided into twelve turns, in which players will take turns drawing a tile and placing it on their planet core. Each tile may be made up of different biomes, each of which has the capacity to support certain animals.
Each turn there will be goal cards that will be awarded at the end of the turn to the players whose planets have the requisite biomes. For example, the “Seal” goal card is awarded to the player who has the most tundra tiles that don’t border any desert tiles. The game ends after the completion of the twelfth turn and the winner is determined by who has accumulated the most points through goal cards.
Overall, there are some elements of this game that worked quite well. The tiles you place on your planet are permanent and you can look ahead to future goal cards. This leads to an interesting strategy where you may sacrifice the goal card for the current turn by drawing a tile that prepares you to fulfill the goal for a future turn. Additionally, the 3D planet core is a unique element that is immediately attention grabbing: games whose mechanics center around placing hexagonal tiles are common, but not ones in which they are placed in 3D! Finally, the themeing of the game worked well– the “biome” tiles make sense for a game in which you are constructing a planet, and the animal cards were cute and well designed.
Ultimately, though, I feel like this game falls flat. The main reason for this is that the 3D element doesn’t do enough in terms of gameplay to justify the unnecessary problems it causes. The major way this impacted the game was through player interaction. Because players need to be constantly spinning their own 3D planet cores around to strategically place their tiles, their focus is immediately drawn down to the table, away from each other. Next, because the goal cards are awarded to the player who has the most or least of a given biome, the only way to know whether placing a specific tile is a good move is to be constantly aware of the layouts of your opponents planets. However, because their tiles are arranged in 3D, you need to physically spin around your opponent’s globes. This is both awkward and impractical, and, in practice, players just neglected to keep track of their opponents which obstructed an important strategic element of the game.
Finally, the industrial design of the 3D structure obstructs gameplay. The magnets don’t snap into place very well and it’s easy to accidentally knock a tile off. This essentially ruins the game unless you can remember the exact spot that the tile fell from, as the position of tiles is important for fulfilling goal cards. Generally, the planet cores felt cheap and the tiles did not snap in well enough to be comfortably handled and spun around, as the game’s mechanics push you to do. There seems to be an inherent conflict here between the physical structure of the game and the way players are incentivised to strategize. Ultimately, this game works much better in theory than in execution.
