‘Wingspan’ Players Will Love the ‘Earth’ Board Game
Earth is a new engine building board game of assembling a brand new island to either your own lush paradise or barren wasteland.
Earth is one of the most anticipated new games of the year. It’s been sitting on Board Game Geek’s Hotness List for a while now. Even from an initial overview, it can be easy to see why. It’s very reminiscent of games like Wingspan, with a simple premise but enough options for some deep strategy.
Earth Overview
Earth is a competitive engine builder board game with resource and hand management. Each player is building a tableau representing their own island. The players choose their type of island, its climate, and its ecosystem.
Each of these cards determines the players starting hand, starting resources, abilities to use on their turns, and how they score points. Already, right off the bat, Earth offers tons of replayability with a ton of different starting conditions.
On each player’s turn, they will activate one of the four actions. Actions allow players to play and draw cards, gain soil (the game’s main currency), compost cards, or grow their current cards. When a player chooses an action, all players will be able to perform a lesser version of the action.
Additionally, all players activate any cards they have of the same color as that action. Cards have actions associated with them and any player choosing that color of action will allow that card to be used.
At the end of the Earth board game, points are scored based on a lot of factors, so get your pen and paper ready. Points can be scored directly from cards, how many cards you composted, for each spout and tree, and based on the terrain cards. There are points for building chains of icons on cards, points for meeting specific conditions based on your starting cards, and even more. It may seem daunting but with this many avenues of scoring, that means just as many paths to victory.
Earth Review
Choosing which cards to plant, where to plant them, how much to water them and grow them, and more all factor into that game’s overall strategy. There are a lot of options for how to play and different strategies to employ. Like games like Wingspan, it might seem like there’s a learning curve at first. However, the basic mechanics of the game are dead simple.
If you’re a fan of engine builder games with a multitude of strategic options, you just might love the Earth board game.
