Planetary Reign

Planetary Reign is definitely a good experience for its current development. It's a solid euro with a lot of optimization. It plays pretty clunky and lopsided for 2 players (there's no real struggle in most sectors for a while, due to path of least resistance principle) but looks like it would fit 4 players very well. Turns can be very short, which reduces downtime. Early game is very fun in that the rounds (years) are short and simple, allowing a lot of economy building. Later turns are tighter, but a little too tight. In our games, we can calculate who will win at the very start of the turn DETERMINISTICALLY meaning there's no point in playing it out if it's 2P only. At least with more players, some can gang up on others and slightly alter the outcome by a few points. Our games were nearly ties every time. With only 2 points difference each time. The art design is also amazing; I tend to love stuff like this especially with bright colors. I can see that with lack of characterization (such as in Twilight Imperium), it could get old and samey after a while.

Bad things: Ship combat is way too wonky. Mostly due to the fact that the first player to advance tech is always ahead in tech if they just keep advancing it (you can only advance it once per round). Therefore, since players can't have fleet strength above their tech level, it's one of the only decent ways to defend yourself. You basically have to take it. If ships could just be built at that level but upgraded above it, this would reward mining players without unbalancing combat. Overall I think it really needs different rules, something like Kemet's cards or Dungeon Quest 3rd ed's cards. I see the designer wanted determinism, which is fine. But at least allow for hidden information and bluffing to offset the pure leveraging of economy against other economy in the form of ships.

The lack of ANY hidden information (for individual players) means games become hyper deterministic the longer you play since optimal choices become more apparent to everyone. It also makes ship combat a snoozefest.

The fact that whomever starts with initiative in a 2 player 3-status phase game also ends with initiative is a minor imbalance that should be fixed. I'm sure there's a problem like this in 3-4 with the different game lengths but I haven't checked.

Government is way too important. Not having your culture advance almost every turn makes it pretty much impossible to win no matter what. The reason is that you can't really get extra actions without it. You can maintain action levels by converting workers into species (which you don't feed, we'll get to that later) which is nice and works to maintain actions while increasing VP along the track. However, you have to get new workers. It becomes a huge arms race for action economy and you lose out the round you don't take this. The only other way I can see waiting is if you wanted to spend round 1 making a Factory (+1 worker next round on your structure), then round 2 on making an Environment which gets you +1 worker/food at that point, making your advancements along culture less costly. In fact I'm convinced after some math that this is not just good but required to even have a chance against someone who's decent at the game.

Not having the installation level 2s and 3s in the main game is a huge problem; moreso than we thought going into this. So many turns were just "well I wish I could spend this extra (resources) and species on upgrading my installations but I can't!". Trade installation is near useless as you should never really run out of things to mine. It's probably the second most useless next to the Observatory, which has rarely made any difference at all. Nothing like extra fuel/workers/organics/VP/a fleet per game. In fact hangers are completely required. Without that third fleet on board, you can't adequately defend yourself or spend fuel efficiently, nor get as many VP per round.

Technology doesn't just need fleet size fixed. It also NEEDS some sort of choice. Without any choices, tech becomes an arms race between all players (exactly like culture). When leveling your tech, you should have to choose between 2 chits. The existing techs like terraforming/shielding or whatever and new techs that need to be added in. I'm sure I'll test a few that seem balanced and come back to this but this is not an optional thing. Without differing "quality" in choices, it just becomes a game of pure "quantity" of choices. In Twilight Imperium, not only does choosing a strategy, like Tech, allow other players to expend resources to also use that strategy (albeit sometimes a weaker version) but also gives each player a different choice based on their current tech tree position. In this way, no two player's choices will be equal. In this game, it's just a box to check.

Once all players get Ion Drive, flipping over years for gate closings feels stupid and pointless. This is especially bad in 2-3 player games where someone can't just sit behind on the tech line.

Last point that must be addressed: Slavery. This is not a nice subject. The "species" you find in the game are all natives to planets you go to. They are not friends of your empire, and like an empire you either keep them in "holding areas" where all they can do is one job over and over like a slave OR "assimilate" them which involves killing one of them from a group of 2-3 and getting 1-2 workers out of it respectively. This paints a pretty ghastly picture and I would at least respect it if this were some optional thing you could do, like your morality goes out the window and you get slave labor. But no, this isn't optional it's required and a core part of the game. This needs to be immediately addressed at least within the flavor of the game. Regardless if they make them "robots" (hey the factory converts metal to workers) a la Master of Orion 2 or whatever, it seems pretty asinine to just gloss over this major crime against another species. Even something as simple as saying you find settlers or tradesmen who want to find work in your empire (after all, they all suit exactly one job anyway). Since you don't actually feed them, having a ton of species is an excellent thing for your empire but morally bankrupt and not reflected as such in game.

Let's also go over one last imbalance in the game: every area has 3 holding pen slots but but for now Structures actions only has spaces for ONE use. Fleets have only 2 (and post-expansion Structures). The rest have 3 spots you could conceivably use with species, though many are less useful than others at 3 just due to their frequency of use organically in the game. I'm not sure if these are intended to just kind of "hang out" for the ones with only 1-2, but it does seem a bit strange. Adding in those Structure upgrades would soft fix this and players could overlook their third in each of those areas since they can be assimilated later.

Overall I think it's a decent enough game for 3-5 plays and has the potential to be a GREAT game worth dozens at minimum if a few design decisions were addressed. Right now it's still in development. We'll see where this goes.

Kickstarter!

I love this game!

I really liked this. It's certainly a euro worker placement style 4X game. But it's different than other space 4X games; uniqueness is a major advantage.

I probably liked it more than Eclipse (but I haven't played Eclipse in ages).

It's solid, with just a few ways in which it could be streamlined, made more ergonomic and intuitive, and more interactive.