Meeple-Tinted Glasses

There’s already quite a few games out there with the theme of us earthlings launching into space to try and make a planet habitable. Among those, there’s actually only fewer still that lets you do terraform a fictional planet. At least the planet is named Eurybia like any respectable Greek god, so we can still put the planet up there with Mars and Venus. Or not, since both of those planets have Roman ancestry.

But anyway, Reworld is this game. Designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, the duo who designed the excellent Tikal, Reworld utilizes a a mechanic that I’ve seen very few games use. It has two chapters, and once the game is done with the first chapter, you wouldn’t be able to go back to that phase of the game, and the game ends after the second chapter.

The first chapter puts the players inside the massive spaceship ExoFox5, at this time still anchored to Earth’s orbit, in which the players will scramble around to assemble a pod of modules for themselves using numbered cards. These modules will allow them to prepare Eurybia for civilization, with the modules allowing them to build cities, set up defense perimeters, and, since this is a game, score points. After five rounds of getting modules, the game then transitions to the second chapter. Outside of the orbit of Eurybia, the players will launch their modules on the face of the planet. Or maybe just outside the orbit. Once all of the modules in each players pods have been successfully ejected from their pod, the game ends. The player with the most number of points wins the game.

Now here’s the interesting thing. These modules can be set up in five lines, and when you obtain a module, they will be locked up in a position that will make them unable to launch unless they’re the outermost module of that line. And there’s a certain order in which you would want to launch modules, specifically because terrabot modules build a huge bulk of your board, builder modules cannot be launched by themselves, said modules can only be launched when accompanied by shuttle modules, and satellite modules score immediate points based on what the state of your board is already like. That’d mean that you’d want to obtain satellites first, builders and shuttles in a specific launch pattern so that you can launch one shuttle with two builders, and terrabots last. BUT obtaining terrabots are also the only means of racking up points in the first chapter, and that’s a problem, because the first things you obtain are usually the last things you can get to launch, and getting them to launch last will render most of your satellites mostly useless. At least you can turn your satellites and shuttles into defense perimeters as shields, but that would mean you’re losing out on the point boost of the satellites or failing to launch your builders. You’re basically scrambling to get specific modules lined up in a certain order, and in a very puzzle-type aspect, you launch them in the reverse order. First to get in goes out last.

And I haven’t even talked about how you actually use the numbered cards to obtain modules. ExoFox5 has a grid of slots, with each slot containing a different module. In each slot, you can play one of your cards numbered one to five to obtain the module there. Now, whenever you want to obtain a specific module, and that slot is already adjacent to another card, you need to either play a card with a similar value or play two cards that has a different value with the adjacent card. Of course, if there are two adjacent cards to the slot that you want, you need to play two different sets of cards. So you’ll either play two cards that match both adjacent cards, one card that matches and another differently numbered pair for the other, or two differently numbered pairs for both adjacent cards! The number of the card that you put on top of your played cards also affect which line your module goes to, which isn’t too big of a problem until you realize that you’ve just screwed up your order just because you want to get a specific module in your pod. So, yes, the whole game is a puzzle of how to get things in order so that you can score the highest number of points possible. This game will definitely appeal to gamers who like that sort of puzzle.

However, there are a couple of caveats I have to this game. There’s a certain repetitiveness to the game, especially for two players. I think this stems from the game utilizing every module available in every game. This means that, despite the randomness of when and where the modules will be set up, you will see everything that the game has to offer in terms of variety after your first game. This also extends to the the game’s scoring. All possible bonus points are used in every game, with player count the only thing affecting the number of required things to score a certain amount of points, but every game uses the same criteria to score extra points. Now, that would certainly mean that each game of Reworld would strategically be the same, and you can definitely plan things out better for your future games, but it simply kind of ends up being same-y each game.

Once upon a time, not long after my Magic: the Gathering collection got swept out by a flash flood, I started to look for another avenue for me to be able to scratch the itch of card gaming. I’ve been playing Hearthstone for a good chunk, but I wanted to introduce my then-girlfriend-now-wife, Czeila, to the hobby. And since Hearthstone never quite clicked for her, I had to find another option.

I bought a box of Monopoly Deal, which was something she actually liked due to the familiarity with the IP and simplicity of the design, so I figured she’d like card games. A quick search on the internet for non-collectible card games lead me to Love Letter. This search would also lead me to whole lot of tabletop goodness that I haven’t discovered prior. This was my discovery of the golden age of board games.

Before this period of my life, I knew that tabletop games exist, but I didn’t know that it was experiencing such a resurgence. Most of my tabletop experience boiled down to playing with various collectible and trading card games like the aforementioned Magic, the VS System, Pokemon TCG, and numerous other card games. I’m very much a card junkie, but outside of me buying a starter set of Arcane Legions, knowing about Heroclix, or playing roll-and-moves, I had no idea about the rest of the great games on the market back then.

After buying Love Letter, Czeila’s first reaction was being surprised by the price. $30 for a game with 20 cards and 13 wooden cubes was a bit too much for her. But after playing the game a couple of times, she marveled at how such an elegant game can be accomplished with a mere 16 playable cards, and then went on to realize that a big chunk of the money we spent buying the game was for the idea itself. It was then that I knew that she’d be able to enjoy the hobby as much as I do. For both of us, Love Letter was the game that introduced us to this wonderful hobby.