Earth Review

Earth is a tremendous (tree-mendous?) game of ecological beauty. With 283 Earth cards of fantastic photos depicting a vast variety of our planet’s plant life they encourage you to learn about our vibrant vegetation whilst constructing your own tableau of greenery. There are 20 different Islands you can start from and combined with another 20 Climates and 64 Ecosystems that’s 25,600 possible starting setups. You can add to that the 46 different fauna, that’s animals and birds to you and me, that you can provide habitats for. As InsideUp Games, themselves, say welcome to nature’s diversity!

Earth Song

Earth by Maxime Tardif says it is “presented” by Conor McGoey. Well, however the reponsibilities between the two of them were divided the resultant production exudes absolute class from start to finish. This game is a joy to own and could justify its existence by just being left out on the coffee table. But is it a great game to play? Well, generally, yes but with a few possible caveats. Arguably Earth does for plants what Wingspan does for birds and Ark Nova does for animals. Now ZATU has just published the updated list for 2023 of their bloggers’ Top 50 all-time favourite games and whilst Earth comes in at a respectable 16, Wingspan reaches no. 7 and Ark Nova tops the whole list. To consider why let’s first discuss the gameplay.

Where On Earth

You start with an Island on which to grow your paradise. You also have a Climate. These are not pre-linked together but are allocated at the start, either by random draw or by informed choice and it is up to you to try to get a climate that will naturally go with your island. You also have a choice of 2 Ecosystems which will provide bonus VPs at game end if their conditions are met. The island card will tell you how many Earth cards you are given, how many you can keep and how many go into your Compost pile. You are also given a certain amount of Soil tokens. Soil is the currency of the game that you use to plant plants.

Each turn the Active player can choose to perform 1 of 4 Actions: Planting; Composting; Watering; Growing and, utilising a system the designers call Simultaneous Prosperity, all the other players also get to do the same thing but to a lesser degree. This is a great idea and keeps everyone involved at all times avoiding the tedium of waiting for your turn at higher player counts. These 4 actions are somewhat self-explanatory and some somewhat less so:-

• Planting – you plant up to 2 Plants in your 4 x 4 Tableau to the side of your playing board and take a replacement Earth card
• Composting- you take Soil and also put Earth cards in your compost
• Watering - here you get Sprouts to add on to your plants and more soil
• Growing - you add “growth” to your plants in the form of stackable wooden trunk pieces topped with painted Canopies

Each of these 4 Actions has a colour: Green, Red, Blue, Yellow and if your Island,Climate or Plants in your Tableau show the same colour in their Action bar you get to perform that beneficial Action. Play continues until someone completes their 16 card tableau and then the, rather lengthy, final scoring takes place.

Life On Earth

A Fauna board provides opportunities for bonus VPs. It is two sided with a beginner’s side and the standard side as shown. Here 4 of the double-sided Fauna cards are placed at the start of the game plus 2 Ecosystem cards. If your planted Tableau provides the environment for a particular animal to thrive, e.g. at least 4 trees for the Orang-Utan, you place a leaf token alongside it to score points at game end. The 1st to do so will score more points and so on.

Similarily the double-sided Ecosystem cards indicate VPs that can be gained for particular conditions.

How On Earth

You win by amassing more VPs than anyone else and there are 10 different ways you can score them. From the plants themselves, their growths and the various combinations for the bonuses. So as you plant your tableau you aim for scoring juxtapositions and to add cards that provide the colour coded actions that are your plant growing engines.

Here we come to the main issue that, in my view, stops Earth achieving absolute perfection – the colour choices. Green, Red, Blue and Yellow are fair enough if they were bright primary colours but the shades used on the Action areas and cards are Olive, Terra Cotta, Turquoise and Ochre. The Blue/Turquoise is often mistaken for the Green and the Red/Terra Cotta is even a different shade on the cards than on the Player Boards also the Ecosystem card on your Player Board is in a much more solid Green so I ended up having to endlessly explain to newbies “No, that isn’t a Green action!”

Also it is not immediately apparent until you peer intensely at the tiny graphical symbols which colour action you need to take to achieve what you want. Even the names don’t always help. Whilst Planting and Growing are fine, if you want more Soil aka money you do a red Composting action or if you need Sprouts you do a Turquoise blue Watering one. For my own benefit I’ve added labels to my Player Boards. Depicted above is not some enhanced Kickstarter version of Earth but my ink-jet printed in primary colours and Blu-Takked on labels bearing the legends : PLANT, SOIL, SPROUT, GROW!

Two, more minor, niggles: given the general component excellence I found the Canopies a bit underwhelming, looking more like flag poles than tree tops and my friend who always assumes the rôle of banker wanted more shape and size differentiations in the soil denominations.

I Give You The Earth

Notwithstanding the above, Earth is an excellent choice and should be in every Eurogamer’s collection. As well as the main game you also get a highly praised Solo mode and a Team game variant. There are so many options in the box that you will never play the same game twice. The double-edgedness of that, is that you can not develop an overall winning strategy but must react to what you are given and the range of choices you can make can be overwhelming. But better to have too many than too few, right? Also, as is common with so many games, I would double the game time length given.

So to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling;- If you can fill the unforgiving two and a half hours with 150 minutes of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it!

Editors note: This post was originally published on 4th Jan 2023. Updated on 10th April 2024 to improve the information available.