Summary
With this expansion is you can play it from 1 to 6 players
Playing time is 45 to 90 minutes
Publisher is Inside Up Games
Introduction
Earth, the soil that supports and sustains our beautiful planet, Earth. Over thousands of years of evolution and adaptation the flora and fauna of this unique planet have grown and developed into amazing life forms, creating symbiotic ecosystems and habitats.
It’s time to jump into these rich environments and create some amazing natural synergies that replicate and extrapolate on Earth’s amazing versatility and plethora of natural resources. Create a self-supporting engine of growth, expansion, and supply where even your unused plants become compost for future growth.
With this expansion, the end goal in Earth remains the same. Your goal is to collect as many points as possible by placing the cards in a 4 by 4 grid.
What’s new in this expansion? Please note! This is a preview copy so be aware that this a is prototype!
What’s new in this expansion?
You get seeds, you can use them for a number of actions. For example you can obtain them by turning in a leaf token or 4 sprouts. But you can also use them for 3 sprouts, converting cards to compost, getting soil or growth or the newest action searching for a card with objectives. Just a little extra explanation about this last action, once you want to deploy seed during your turn (you may do this whenever you want) and indicate that you want to perform this action. Specify which card you are looking for, e.g. A card with 2 abilities, then turn over the draw pile and start looking at the cards one by one from below until you come across this card. The first card with the corresponding objective is the card you must take. Discard the drawn cards to the discard pile and turn the draw pile over again.
You also get extra playing material for a 6th player, extra earth cards, sprouts etc., a new 11 VP token (so people want to complete earlier the 4×4 grid. You also get an overlay for your player board that shows the new actions, how this will look is still to be seen.
More fauna, eco, climate and island cards for more replayability voor de Earth.
The game also includes a new layer of player interaction, on some cards there are actions where you as a player receive something but also either all players, the other players or receive something from another players tableau. This makes you sometimes help your opponent but also the benefits you receive are also very useful.
In the base game, you had to place the sprouts on cards immediately and if you couldn’t do this, you were out of luck. This sometimes resulted in not choosing an action until you could place the sprouts. With the new rules you can also save the sprouts and place them at the end of your turn on new cards. You can’t exchange them for soils or seeds and you don’t receive any points at the end of the game for the leftovers on your board.
Conclusion & final score
We think this is a very nice expansion, Earth is already a very great game to play and this expansion only makes some things better. Saving sprouts is one of them, because sometimes it was frustrating when you couldn’t place those green cubes, so now you get to keep them in a personal supply.
The player interaction is also nice, although is it really player interaction? The other players get something and that is often an advantage for them, so there is also an advantage for you because you get a bonus first but so do the other players. For example, some cards give you growth for every tree that one of the other players have in their tableau. It is a nice addition that makes you a little more involved with each other.
The 11 victory points have the purpose that you still want to be the first to go for them, 11 points is again a little more than the 7 points you got before.
Extra cards etc. are definitely good because you have even more choice, you get about 70 cards although something might change during the Kickstarter. The extra Fauna, Island, Eco and Climate cards provide some extra choice. The pink color for the 6th player will be changed because this looks a lot like another color in the game. We just love extra material for a game so this makes us excited. Won’t the extra cards make you have to search even longer for a particular card? No, for that you really need to use the addition of seeds. With these seeds you can search for cards you would like to have, e.g. to achieve goals before the end of the game or just extra points etc.. Really use them for this and that makes the pile of cards well used, but also the other actions you can do with these seeds can be very useful.
With this prototype we also got overlays for the existing player boards, you place these over the explanation on your player board but they are still looking at how you will make this look later. They do slide sometimes but beyond that we had no problems with them.
Are you excited now too? Then click on the link to the Kickstarter campagne, If you backed this expansion then you also get wooden resource upgrades and these are really nice!
We do want to point something positive out, we have received several prototypes over the past few years but this was really one of the best prototypes. It all looks so nice and we were able to use it without noticing that they were game parts from a prototype.
Thanks to Inside Up Games for this preview copy and the opportunity to write about it.
