Episode 241: Earth

Earth is one of those – Easy to Learn – Hard to master type games – If you have familiarity with Terraforming Mars or Wingspan, then you instantly have a leg up when learning Earth! In Earth, Players are competing to score the most victory points possible – The end of the game is triggered when a player places their 16th card into their island – a 4×4 tableau in front of each layer.

In turn order, Players will select one of 4 different actions – the interesting bit here is EVERYONE at the table gets to use a lowered powered version of the action you select – so choose carefully!

The first, and arguably most important action, is Planting. When you take the plant action you (and eveyrone else at the table) are allowed to add cards to their Island – a 4×4 tableau next to their playerboard, by paying their soil costs.

The second option is Composting – which allows players to gain Soil – the resource used to PLANT cards in Earth – This action also allows you to add cards to your compost pile, which is another currency in EARTH.

Action 3 is called Wattering and it allows players to grow Sprouts on their flora cards which can accommodate them

And the final action is called “Growth” which allows players to draw cards as well as adding GROWTH (or TRUNK) tokens to flora cards that can accommodate them.

One other important piece related to selecting your action – Each of the 4 action spaces ALSO allows -everyone at the table- to activate cards of the associated color (Green, Red, Blue, Yellow or RAINBOW). This is where the real excitement happens! Watching the player-built engines fire up and produce large amounts of soil, sprouts or trunks is mesmerizing and rewarding!

Many of the points in Earth are related to the cards in your tableau at the end of the game – but the points that you really want to watch out for are the in-game scoring Fauna Objectives. Unlike games like Terraforming Mars, where the objectives (or achievements) are the same every game, Fauna Cards are randomly selected from a big stack at the begining of the game, making the feel – and your objectives – quite different from game to game!

Adding to the variability, Each player has special abilities related to the unique island card and Ecosystem card that they selected at the beginning of the game. Players continue selecting one of these 4 main actions until any player places their 16th card into their island, which triggers the end of the game. Triggering this milestone earns that player a few extra points, which can be the difference between the winner and the loser! You are very much making a good ole fashioned POINT SALAD out of the wonderful Flora and Fauna of Earth – You basically get points for anything and everything you have done throughout the game, offering a very satisfying conclusion to the game, regardless of score.

And that is how you play Earth, designed by Maxime Tardif and published by Inside Up Games.