A Seedy World of Plenty
Earth. A place so cool they made a board game out of it. This ecosystem tableau and engine builder is now getting an expansion, Earth: Abundance.
Abundance adds, as you might have guessed from the name, a whole lot of new cards. Most of them are focused on interacting with other players and while the solo rules have been adapted to make them still work, what kind of impact they’ll have on a game for us will have to be seen. But there’s more. For example, you can now store sprouts on your board, which may definitely come in handy in the beginning of the game (when you may not yet have room on the cards in your tableau).
Biggest change however, is the addition of seeds, a new element that will lead to more strategic gameplay. You can convert a leaf or four sprouts to a seed at any time. And then, again at any time, convert a seed for whatever it is that you need. Not just for the regular resources like soil, growth, sprouts or compost, but also for a card, with a new mechanism called germinating. With germinating you can search the deck for one card with a specific characteristic on it. This will feel way less frustrating than all the blind drawing of cards that the base game has.
Personal opinion: I love tableau builders and pretty pictures, so I backed Earth during the previous campaign. I enjoyed the first few of my multiplayer games, but didn’t care for the bot in solo. Also, there are too many ways in which you score points and this can lead to crazy complicated things to keep track of while building your tableau. I had less and less fun playing and sold it. That said, the new elements of Abundance look solid to me. The seeds remind me of prestige in Race for the Galaxy and I love the mechanism there. If you enjoyed playing Earth, I think this one’s a no-brainer.
Earth: Abundance will launch on Kickstarter this Monday, April 22. It comes with wooden resource upgrades and it looks like the base game will be available as well.