In Mission: Red Planet, two to six players compete to occupy Mars and mine its celerium, sylvanite, and ice. You earn points from not only harvesting ores and ice, but also from completing a secret mission, which may involve controlling specific zones of the planet or amassing a certain type of ore. Whoever has the most points at the end of ten rounds wins.

The 22 best board games - Polygon The 22 best board games - Polygon

What if you could hold the whole world in your hands? Build your own world of rich and varied habitats to make a home for your favourite species? Carefully balance the oceans, forests and deserts to build a thriving animal kingdom? In Planet, each player begins the game with an empty planet and ever the course of the game you’ll at 12 magnets to the 12 faces to build you own world. In later rounds you will each compete over end of round cards which reward you with animals based on whether your planet is most well suited to their needs. Some animals want the largest zone of a single terrain next to another terrain type or not next to a specific terrain type. Others will go to the player with the most of a specific terrain. At the end of the game, points will be award for the different animals and the player with the most points wins.You begin the game with a secret mission to carry out on the Red Planet, and you may gain another mission in the course of the game. It might entail controlling all of Mars’s southern hemisphere, stationing at least one astronaut in every zone, or amassing heaps of sylvanite, celerium, and ice. Other players won't know for certain what your secret mission is until the end of the game. The more subtly you can work towards it, the less chance there is of your opponents guessing your agenda and working to sabotage your efforts. The Planet board game ends after the 12th round; when the player’s planets are fully covered and the last animal cards have been won. Starting in round 3, animals begin to appear. These cards are awarded via a simple majority mechanic—for example, whoever has the largest forest next to an ocean gets the card. These cards are worth 1-2 points at the end of the game. Set up is relatively straight forward. The magnetic terrain tiles are shuffled and placed into ten piles of five. Space needs to be left for additional piles at the end of the line although no tiles are placed there during set up. These piles will be populated by tiles discarded in earlier rounds. Each pile denotes a round of the game.

Leaving Earth | Board Game | BoardGameGeek Leaving Earth | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

The set contains: Resources organizer, 2 card trays, Players' component organizer and Scorepad container.I think Planet is going to be a nice hit for Blue Orange Games’ core audience. As a family weight game, it not only has a cool 3D element that’s sure to be a crowd pleaser, but the rules are light enough that you can get it to the table with just about anyone. The only downside is that the magnets aren’t as strong as they should be. Even though the gameplay in Planet is very light, there is a lot of forward thinking that is required to win the game. As players can see all the cards laid out at the start of the game, you really have to start planning ahead for which ones you want to grab. The obvious choice is to go for animals matching your terrain type. The whole two birds with one stone thing. Yet the nice thing about the card mechanics is that it rewards you for collecting animals NOT matching your secret terrain type. This helps create some interesting situations where you clearly want to grab those snow cards to hit the bonus, but also want the other terrain for the extra VPs they grant. Overall the card art was pretty well done. Add into that the secret objective card and the fact that you score less point for an animal that is from the same habitat as your habitat objective card, and you get a game that has a lot more depth to it than its appearance suggests. SCOREPAD CONTAINER: A simple container adjusted to the Scorepad. Indentation facilitates taking it out. Second, it makes it difficult to see what you and other players have going on. There is a lot of asking people “how many mountains do you have” or rotating around to count your total oceans. Depending on how serious your players are in the game, this could be a non-issue or a majorly frustrating. While I think that the game would have functioned a bit better with just flat tiles on the table, it would have been much much less cool.

Planet Apocalypse | Board Game | BoardGameGeek Planet Apocalypse | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

In the last (12th) round, if an animal card cannot be won by having the most of one kind of region, it is returned to the box. With both the other card scenarios if there is a tie, the players look at their second-biggest suitable habitat area and the winner takes the card. In the unlikely event of another tie, they look for a 3rd suitable habitat area. Game End RESOURCES ORGANIZER: It has 4 sections for: Biomass, Meteorites, Lifepods and Rovers. One organizer is dedicated for a half of resources, so 2 of them should be 3d printed. Thy can be placed on 2 sides of the table, so all players can reach for components easily. Splendor is the quintessential modern family game. Players take on the role of Renaissance gem merchants trying to collect various precious stones. But that’s not important. What you’re really doing is buying cards that help you buy even more cards, eventually grabbing ones worth a large number of points. It’s a simple game of either buying the card you want or reserving one that you can’t yet afford to keep someone else from grabbing it. All of this is supported brilliantly with a simple yet warm physical production of chunky plastic chips and well-illustrated cards. Each player then randomly draws a secret objective card. The cards each have a different type of terrain and if a player obtains enough terrain segments of that type they will gain points. Players should be aware that they will need different numbers of segments to score points for different types of terrain; this is linked to the frequency with which they occur in the game.Planet is published by Blue Orange Games – a publisher well known for their great family games with high production value and Planet is no exception. The dodecahedron domes are unlike anything you’ve ever seen before in a board game and the big chunky magnetic sides are a joy to play with. Planet is a great choice for families and is certainly a game that will turn heads. It sounds complicated but the rules are easy to follow and the game is very straightforward to play. Which is a good indicator of a great game. Updated September 3, 2023 by Via Erhard: Five-player adventures are some of the best of the board gaming universe since they're a blend of strategy and camaraderie. Some of these five-player board games will whisk players away to vivid worlds with complex ecosystems, allowing them to become guardians of nature or leaders in the wild. Others might plunge them into the intricate world of craftsmanship or have them decipher celestial patterns. Players can go on thrilling adventures while using their management skills and taking calculated risks.

Dune | Board Game | BoardGameGeek Dune | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

Every stage of a mining expedition to Mars boasts its challenges. Each ship can only hold a few passengers, and with so many astronauts headed towards Mars, you may need to resort to subterfuge and sabotage to launch your astronauts into space. Once landed, you could be forced to fight against other mining corporations for control of a zone. Your astronauts could be ruthlessly killed by another corporation, or you might need to eliminate a few astronauts yourself. You may find that a zone's deposits are rich beyond your expectations, or that they contain less ore than you hoped. No matter what, you’ll need to be wily to win the race for Mars’s resources.Blue Orange Games seems to be carving out quite a name for themselves with their accessible line of family games. Kingdomino was a fantastic take on dominoes, and Photosynthesis was a mean little game with some pretty 3d trees. Both have made their way to my tabletop quite often. Tile-laying games appear to be growing in popularity at the moment. This is the latest such game from Blue Orange games.