Abundance - an Earth expansion

Have you played Earth? We spent the last couple of weekends with a ton of gardening 🌿, which put us right in the mood for some nature-themed gaming. Just in time, the prototype for the new expansion of 🌏 Earth called Abundance arrived recently, which fits the bill perfectly! 🙃Fun fact: today is Earth Day and the Kickstarter campaign for it will start today! 😮

If you don't know Earth, here's a super quick rundown: 😉 It's a tableau-builder card drafting game, in which you are making a 4x4 grid of cards with all kinds of plants and terrain. Lots of scoring opportunities and synergies between cards are the highlight of the game, aided by beautiful presentations with wooden tokens.

But let's talk about Abundance now, and why not start with the simplest addition: you get more cards that you can mix into the basic pools of cards for even more variety. There are quite a few new icons and effects though! ☝️ Some of these also aim to infuse some player interaction into the game - certain cards reference your neighbour’s tableau or benefit every player in some way. It's definitely something that Earth didn’t have before.

There is also a new resource called Seeds 🌰 with multiple ways to exchange them for all kinds of things, which adds some flexibility and can help you out in a pinch. Also new is an action called Germination that you can perform by spending a Seed: 👉 you get to name basically any feature of a card, then start drawing cards until you find one that matches. 🧐 This helps combat draw randomness and aid you when you are missing that crucial piece to your combo.

Finally, with the expansion you get additional components for a 6th player, so you can play with an even bigger group!

💬 In summary, Abundance doesn't change the gameplay in a major way but it adds even more variety and mends some of the complaints people might have had with the base game. If you are a fan of Earth, you will enjoy this expansion.