Episode 213: Gaia Project

In Gaia Project, you are a unique faction with individual player powers striving to peacefully colonize the Terra Mystica galaxy. During the game, you will colonize new planets, upgrade mines into better structures, and unite planets to form federations. In addition, you will need to research and discover new technologies to improve your skills. In the end, only the best developed faction will win. The game plays over six rounds that contain unique round scoring abilities. Each player has a faction board with all their bits (and there are a lot of bits), the research board that holds all of the different standard and advanced tech tiles, and the modular game board. A round consists of four phases (income, Gaia, action and clean-up). The heart of the game is during the action phase in which players choose one of the following actions: Build a Mine- this is the expansion part of the game where players are spending ore and credits to put mines onto new discovered planets, you can start a Gaia Project which is necessary if you want to colonize an a Transdim planet, Upgrade Existing Structures which is super important as your faction is advancing and learning new research and tech-unlocking these structures typically provide more income in the form of credits, power, resources and techs. Players can also form a Federation which is essentially connecting all of your structures together via placing satellites and gain you a super powerful federation token that provides resources but also necessary if you want to advance to the highest level of a research track. There are a ton of other actions like researching to move up on the research paths, moving your power around inside your bowls to charge them so you can spend them and then special actions, finally a player can pass. Oh wait, there are also a ton of free actions to do if you have the resources and also passive actions that can happen when other players build and upgrade adjacent to planets you have already mined. Do you expand near other factions to give you power or will you look for solitude to expand more deeply into the galaxy? Let’s head back to the studio to hear the pegs thoughts on Gaia Project.