Earth getting wilder
🌏 Earth is a beautiful and fun tableau-building game that you probably already heard of. 😉 In it, you build a 4x4 tableau with 16 cards, trying to synergistically combine cards to score the most points. Flora 🌱 cards you have can gain sprout and growth tokens which add a cool tactile aspect to the tableau, while Terrain 🏜️ cards give extra scoring conditions that influence the way you place out your cards.
Earth is just now getting a second expansion called 🐆 Animal Kingdom, which adds a new mechanic to the game, using awesome & colorful animeeples. 🤩
From the 36 Animal cards of the expansion, 1 will be randomly chosen facedown for its global ability - each time a full round is completed, this ability is activated for everyone. This adds a bit of additional replayability to games. 🙃 Then after a quick drafting, everyone will choose 1 or 2 animal cards depending on the chosen “difficulty”.
So what do animals do? 🧐 Each time you discard a leaf 🍁 or use one to claim a fauna objective, you can activate your animeeples. Their abilities could create or transform resources or eat some tokens for end game scoring. Most of them will have to walk around on your tableau in order to be activated, which adds a bit of a challenge. For example a polar bear can only move on cards with the cold climate tag - the more it moves, the better the bonus, so you want to build a tableau that better accommodates your animals. ☝️
💬 My favorite part of Earth was always the spatial aspect of your tableau. E.g. a terrain card could score for mushrooms in its row, which deeply influences your plans for your 4x4 grid. And as you need to place cards adjacent to previous cards this is a constant fun challenge. The more of these effects you have the harder it gets, but also the more profitable. Now with the new animeeples you get another layer on top of this already interesting puzzle. And the fact that they also enhance this tactile 3D-aspect that you don’t normally see in card tableau-builders is a cherry on top. 🙂
If you like Earth, definitely check out the Kickstarter of InsideUp Games ! There are also some additional modules and deluxe upgrades up for grabs. 😉
A prototype of this game was kindly shared by the publisher for us to try out. Just a heads-up: all the components are prototypes, so things might look or play a bit differently in the final version. For more details, check out our content policy.
