A Planet Comes Together

Sometimes, a board game captures the imagination by gimmick alone. You hear what it's about, the one-sentence encapsulation of how it works, and you know you just have to try it. But those games don't always manage to deliver on their tantalizing promise. To me, Planet turned out to be such a game.

Each player receives a slightly-larger-than-fist-sized "planet" to become the creator of. (They're dodecahedrons, or 12-sided dice, if you want to get technical.) Players draft tiles of several different terrain types, and must place them on their planets. The components are all magnetic, so your planet actually comes together (and can be viewed) in all three dimensions. In each round, a selection of animal cards are each drawn to the one planet that best meets a particular condition -- largest ocean next to forest, largest tundra not next to mountains, and so forth. Final scoring at the end rewards you for a particular terrain type on your planet, and for the animals you've successfully attracted there.

It's an amazing idea that, sadly, does not work so smoothly when you actually sit down to play the game. In theory, it's a game of full public information. You know that, say, at the end of next round, you're going to want a big forest on your planet -- and not next to an ocean. But where do you stand in that particular race? Well, you can pick up your planet and count the tiles... but you can't easily see all your opponent's planets because they're all three dimensional.

You have two solutions, equally bad. You can examine (or the other players to pass you) opposing planets, but the magnets aren't that secure. Several times as we played, people dropped their planets, and even just a couple of inches was far enough and hard enough to knock multiple tiles off. Good luck putting it back together exactly the way it was supposed to be.

Alternatively, you can ask everyone else to count their own planets and tell you the numbers. This quickly becomes time-consuming and burdensome. You want to know where you stand this round. Another person, thinking ahead, is looking at the requirements for next round. Maybe someone else is even thinking multiple rounds ahead. So before each drafting phase, you have to go through a lengthy "Q&A" phase. "What's your largest forest?" "Next to water?" "No, mountain." "Five." "But since you brought it up, how about next to water?" "Well, what about your largest ocean?" And as the planets fill up, you can't even be sure you've counted particularly large regions correctly, as they stretch around to the opposite side of your planet.

The game would be much easier to play if this kind of information was simply kept secret. Yet it would also be profoundly unsatisfying, taking away much of the look-ahead, the jockeying for position, and any possibility of planning. The cool gimmick that makes you want to experience the game in the first place becomes the element that makes it so difficult to play -- if you could just glance over at a flattened map with tiles in front of each opponent, you could easily learn everything you want to... and without tipping off your opponents about what strategic consideration you're looking to next.

Planet really is a neat idea. But this particular rules set fell very short for me. I'd give the game a C-. Other tile placement games may be less flashy, but there are many that play much more smoothly.