A worldbuilding game. Literally.
PLANETARIUM
Designer: Stéphane Vachon | Publisher: Game Salute
Where a game like Oceans or Evolution takes us right back to the origin of life (on this planet, at least), Stéphane Vachon’s Planetarium goes even further. The aim of this game is to create planets themselves – four planets in one solar system, to be precise. This is done by smashing matter together with perpetually spinning globula rasas (star blobs) to create evolutionary events which shunt each world towards completion, whether it ends up a toxic-atmosphered rock, or a lifesupporting gas giant.
Each player starts with a hand of five Evolution cards: two ‘Low Evolution’, two ‘High Evolution’ and one ‘Final Evolution’, which can’t be played until the final round of the game. These typically present a bunch of criteria required to lay down an orb-forming chapter in one of the four planet’s stories. For example, if you gather water and gas on a terrestrial world, you’ll give it an ozone layer, earning you six points and making it more habitable. You lay your card out on the relevant edge of the board, joining a tableau that actually has little function other than to track which player’s applied each developmental leap, and also tell the story of the planet’s formation come the game-end.
In order to collect all this spacestuff, each player starts their turn by moving one token one place on the busy orbital board, attractively and efficiently graphic-designed by Dann May. You can either move matter or one of the four planets, and tokens can only go clockwise. This sounds quite limiting, but there’s always something useful you can do, while it gets more engagingly challenging later in the game as matter is swept up leaving, well, more space in space.
Your short-term aims – evolutions for points – are simple enough to achieve, to the degree that you won’t really need to bother too much with the Low Evolution cards and will do better to focus on High Evolutions, which require no Low Evolution prerequisites; an arguable design flaw that actually has little negative impact on the game. But what you must keep your eye on are those Final Evolution cards, which can’t be played until the board’s Evolution Track is filled with used matter, triggering the final round.
By this point, you’ll have had the option to draw Final Evolution cards at the end of each card-playing turn, up to a maximum of four in your hand. The more you’ve collected, the more options you have to bag the big, game-swinging points. But you’ll have also limited your chances of scoring for earlier evolutions, and will need to meet more complex criteria for each Final card. For example, to achieve “Radiation-baked orb”, you’ll need to have collected three metal tokens on a hostile world that you’ve previously played a card on; for “Hot Jupiter”, you’ll need to have manoeuvred a gas-world into one of the three orbits closest to the sun.
It’s quite a quick game, given the eon-spanning, system-spinning theme, and not exactly the thinkiest, while player interaction is minimal. But there is gentle satisfaction in its world-creating strategies, making it suitable for family groups, or those who don’t mind a lightweight Euro.
DAN JOLIN
WE SAY
It’s very straightforward and a little dry, but the epic, science-based theme is hugely appealing, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing how each game’s four planets turn out.
WHATS IN THE BOX
► Game board
► 4 Planet tokens
► 4 Optional planet tokens, with stands
► 68 Matter tokens
► 4 Habitable/ Hostile tokens
► 4 Player mats
► 8 Scoring markers
► 32 Player markers
► 52 Evolution cards
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED PETRICHOR…
It’s about making planets rather than creating clouds, but there’s some similarity in its lightly applied ‘gather and create’ system and nature-based theming.