Earth Express is one of the two games on Inside Up Games’ latest Kickstarter campaign. As with Sanctuary’s relationship to Ark Nova or Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game’s and Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition’s to Terraforming Mars, these new games exist in the same space as their elder sibling, Earth, but are significantly simpler while still retaining a lot of the flavour of the original game—artwork, game concepts, iconography and so on.
Where Earth is a 1–5 player game estimated to take 45–90 minutes, Earth Express takes less than half an hour to play even with its maximum of 8 players (thanks mainly to simultaneous play).
The aim of the game is to complete a 3×3 grid of grid of plant and terrain tiles, maximising scored points from those cards and separate objective cards. The game comes with an enormous pile of cards, and a corresponding range of scoring options and actions: some cards score by themselves, while others rely on particular aspects of other cards in your tableau; actions can be dependent on patterns of cards or tree growth. There are a lot of possibilities for synergistic combinations (though not as many as Earth!), but the game is small enough to limit the potential for analysis paralysis.
Gameplay
At the start of the game, two pairs of public scoring objectives are selected at random. First, in-game scoring, which amounts to a race between players to achieve the goals on the cards (such as having a number of trees of a certain height within your tableau); you can choose to score these such that first player to hit the target gets most points, second fewer, and so on, or to keep things simple and award everyone the same number of points on goal completion. Second, there are optional end-game goals, granting you points on the basis of card patterns or types in the tableau. All of these goals are common, but players also start with a single personal objective card. Players are given a hand of 7 cards and a tableau template, and the game begins. (The one thing I don’t like about the appearance of the game is that tableau template, the 3 strips of card towards the bottom of the image above. Proper boards to lay cards on would be so much nicer, though also more expensive and bulkier, especially with the need to provide 8 of them. The objectives cards have small boards, and I think either no boards [with a scoring strip, similar to and consistent with the tableau strips for the in-game ones] or a single board would have been tidier. Having said that, the campaign hasn’t even started yet and these may not be final components.)
On each turn, players act simultaneously, so an 8-player game shouldn’t last much longer than a 2-player one. (There are no details yet about the solo game mode.) They first select 2 of the 7 cards (only 1 on the final turn) to play into their grid and set aside the rest. The chosen cards can go into any empty space in the grid, bearing in mind the objectives and interactions with other cards already present. Next, the plant cards are activated from top-left to bottom-right. (Terrain cards don’t activate, but are further personal objective cards, which players can place in their grid to add to their final score based on patterns of other cards.) There are 3 types of action (seeds, growth and sprouts), and only cards with strips on the bottom that match the chosen action can be activated, as long as any prerequisites are met (such as existing growth—think of it as a plant being unable to generate seeds unless it’s grown sufficiently), though only 2 action types will be available on each turn, from which players can pick a single option. As cards are activated, the player gains, for example, tree segments to place on cards, sprouts or seeds. These all contribute to final scoring, but have other uses as well, such as trading seeds in for growth or vice versa when cards offer those actions.
One everyone’s done with activation, they pass their unused cards to the next player, who draws 2 more, back up to 7. At this point, players can spend seeds to discard some of their cards and draw new ones (or even spend yet more seeds to go looking through the massive deck for a card with a specific attribute). And then the next turn starts. There is little player interaction besides the card drafting, though some cards give benefits to neighbouring players when activated.
The game ends when the last space on the grid has been filled (given that the grid has 9 spaces and players place 2 cards per turn, apart from at the end, a game will take 5 turns) and the final activation is over. Scores include points from objectives and cards, as well as sprouts and seeds.
Verdict
I have to confess I’ve never actually completed a game of Earth—the sprawling nature of the tableau and amount of choice on each turn has flummoxed my gaming group (which perhaps says more about me and my group than about the game). Earth Express is much more constrained, which I see as a good thing, though this may well annoy the pants off Earth experts. The game is not Earth junior, in the same way as Sanctuary is not Ark Nova junior, and some gamers will foam at the mouth about how it should be either more similar or more different. Just treat it as a separate game which uses some of the same pictures and language. For anyone who wants a point-by-point comparison of the two games, one of the campaign updates contains a list of differences.
Earth Express looks like an enjoyable, pretty, not too brain-taxing nature-based game that could give people a pleasant half hour or so. Based on the campaign information so far, there’s a very high probability of this game taking up a slot on my shelf.
The campaign proper launches on April 22 (Earth Day, which seems rather apt), and I totally recommend keeping an eye on it.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
