Let's evacuate

Evacuation was undoubtedly one of my most anticipated new euros. Not only do Delicious Games and Vladimir Suchy keep providing us with amazing games, we are also fans of sci-fi themes 😍 - and this setting is quite a juicy one! The planet is being burned away by the increasing intensity of the sun, so people have to evacuate to and settle on a new planet. And there are only four years (4 rounds) to achieve this! 🙀

Of course this theme nicely translates to the game mechanics too! Players will have to juggle two of these worlds - old and new - and separately track resources and income for both. 🧐 You don’t just have standard engine-building, instead you have to dismantle the economy of your old world to enable the build-up of your new world. I don’t think we have seen that before in games! 😮 The player boards and game board are also cleverly structured to convey this information.

The core of the game is resource management and action selection - either from a list of possible actions or with the additional use of cards in the advanced variant. Both actions, and the use of spaceships (to carry resources, factories and population) cost energy, which strongly limits you. ☝️This makes the game very tight, so each action should be chosen carefully!

Your goal is to evacuate every site on the old world, raise your production as high as possible on the new one, and additionally have at least 3 stadiums 🏟️ to make your people happy, and all of this in only 4 rounds! 🏃 There are actually 2 modes of play: race or points. In race mode the game ends as soon as someone reaches these prerequisites, in points mode you just play the full 4 rounds and count up points. For us the latter is more fun. (To be honest we aren’t convinced about the part of needing stadiums, but it gets the job done I guess.)

A bunch more things spice the game up even further, like different tech-trees for players to introduce asymmetry, and an intense race for territories on the new world, where placement also has a fun spatial aspect due to infrastructure cards. This game holds a lot in store, so we will back with more! 😊