I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.

It’s a really interesting game, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.

I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.

Pros:

• Simultaneous/shared turns a la Race for the Galaxy work super well in a wingspan-like game. Getting to run your engine on other people’s turns is so much nicer than sitting and waiting for them to deliberate over choices.
• The flexibility of getting to build your own tableau with almost no limitations is a lot of fun, as opposed to building off of an existing engine framework.
• The shared turns have made it (so far) such that I never felt like I was truly pinched for resources. I wasn’t taking actions out of desperation to catch up, I was picking what I felt would get me closer to my actual goals.
• Despite the singleton deck, it never felt like I was unable to find cards with the synergies or qualities I needed.
• There were a good number of high payoff “build around” cards that came up, which is something I always enjoy in a board game.

Cons:

• The iconography could use some work, especially considering how heavily the game relies on it. I mean, the “cold climate” symbol is a five pointed snowflake?! The object that is famously six sided?! I understand having a learning curve, but having a player ask, “what the hell does this symbol mean?” and hour into a game isn’t great.
• Flavor is tenuous, in Wingspan I get that predators hunt smaller birds, that birds which lay lots of eggs and store lots of eggs, etc. In Earth, I have no idea why a given plant has 5 sprouts but only 2 growth, or another one has 2 sprouts and 4 growth. The event cards are even more incomprehensible.
• It’s got a bit of the “egg rush” end game from Wingspan (sprout rush here) but it’s mitigated by shared actions, and having more flexibility in how you build things up (this could have also been placed in Pros, tbh).
• I would never ever want to play this in person. So many fiddly bits interacting that I’m happy to allow BGA to handle for me. Especially considering the scoring, which (again) mirrors Wingspan but has significantly higher totals and would presumably take proportionally longer to count up.
• I understand why a game like this uses photos as card art, but I do really wish they had nice Wingspan-like illustrations instead.

Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I’m looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.