Planet Unknown Board Game Review

Planet Unknown

WBG Score: 8.5

Player Count: 1 - 6

You’ll like this if you like: Barenpark, Isle of Cats

This is the reviewer’s copy. See our review policy here

Earth has run out of resources, and we are yet again tasked with developing an unknown planet with the goal of saving humanity. Have no fear, though, because this time we’ll have the help of SUSAN, checks notes sorry, Lazy Susan… Sorry, explain why this is an advantage again?

How to voyage into the unknown

Place the S.U.S.A.N in the middle of the table. This is the name of the spinning device that’s used in the game. If you happen to have your friend Susan playing, please do not put her on the table; at the very least, it makes for a very awkward conversation. Give everyone a planet board and a corporation board. There are two sides to each, a standard side and an asymmetric side. For at least your first game, use the standard side. Populate the board with life pods in the marked spaces, then place a public objective card in between each pair of players. Each player will be working towards two different objectives with the two players next to them. There’s also an option to use private objectives as well, which you’ll give out now if you're using them. Each person will then put one of their arrow tokens in front of the section of the Susan that they are sitting next to or nearest.

On your turn, you’ll be rotating the Susan (the spinny thing in the middle of the table. Please don’t start rotating your friend Susan in her chair) until you find a section with a tile that you want to take. Take one of the top tiles in your chosen section and place it on your board. At the same time, each other player will take a tile from the section that ends up in front of them and place that tile onto their board as well. Your very first tile of the game must be placed touching one of the edges of the planet, and on subsequent turns, it must be placed adjacent to an already placed tile. If you place a tile over the top of a life pod, then it's destroyed. Some tiles will have asteroids marked on them. If you place one of these tiles, add an asteroid token onto that tile. Each tile will have two resources on it, and when you place it, you’ll move your markers on the corresponding tracks on your corporation board. These will eventually trigger certain effects. The Civ track will eventually get you a choice of different levels of cards that house bonuses or end-game scoring. The rover track lets you move your planetary rover around the board. When they drive over an asteroid or a life pod, then they’re collected and placed on your corporation board. Life pods are worth one point each at the end of the game, and asteroids are worth one point per three collected at the end of the game.

The bio track can get you single square biomass patches that can be placed to fill in those empty squares; these must be placed immediately unless you have the tech that lets you store them. Speaking of which, the tech track will unlock special abilities when you pass certain levels, like, for example, the ability to place tiles anywhere on your board rather than adjacent to a tile. Each track will also have victory points and wild spaces that will let you move up on a different track as well when you land on or pass them.

Once either one complete section is out of tiles or one player can no longer fit a tile on their board, the game will end.

You score any civ cards, points from tracks, and objectives. You’ll also score points for completed rows and columns on your planet board, each one being a slightly different point value. Any asteroids on a row or column will mean it doesn't score, regardless of whether it’s complete or not.

Not just a fun toy

It’d be so easy to look at that S.U.S.A.N in the middle of the table and assume that it’s a gimmick and that it’s there purely for the toy factor and, yes, maybe there is a world where it doesn’t have to be quite as elaborate as it is. But all thoughts like that simply fall away once you play the game and you soon start seeing it for what it actually is, a functional and fun addition to what is, at its core, just a really great game. From the first turn of the game, this satisfying spinner device gives you the first hit of tension every round. When you're not the active player, then watching it is like watching the wheels on a fruit machine or if you’ve ever seen it, Michael McIntyre's The Wheel (try not singing the theme tune next time you play Planet Unknown). Except of course here it’s another player that’s in control of your fate rather than random luck. Before it’s turned, you generally get a good feel for what tile you want from those currently available, and it’s going to be genuinely hard to not show your emotions as those tiles are turned to the perfect position or, even worse, spin frustratingly past you. Now a truly evil player would see this and take advantage, but I’ve genuinely found in my plays that you're too focused on your own board and goals to worry about what other people need. The only time it may become a concern is if you can see that someone can't fit certain tiles on their board and you don’t want the game to end just yet. That concern becomes even less so if they’re not sitting next to you and sharing goals.

Combos and tracks and rovers oh my!

It’s the actual decision around tile placement that really makes this game shine. Now generally, aside from your turn, you don’t get any decision over which two tiles you get to choose, and this escalates as the player count goes up. Now I can legitimately see this being an issue for people who don’t like that lack of control, especially if you end up getting a choice of tiles that have the same resources on them. For me, though, it’s the puzzle of how you use what you're given that makes this game stand out, and let’s face it, if you could choose what you wanted every turn, then it’d be boring. Which tile you choose and where you place it could have multiple implications. Do you place it to help you complete a row? Is it best placed for an objective? Should you even take the one that places an asteroid? And best of all, which tracks do I want to advance on? There’s even an argument to be made that your “off turns” are actually better because you don’t have to sit in an analysis paralysis stupor deciding which of the plethora of tiles you want to pick, because sometimes, picking from just two can be enough of a decision on its own.

The two-player and solo variant throw in a rule that says that on your turn, instead of picking any tray to take time from, you only move the Susan one space to the left. I’ve not played at two, but I have played solo. While this doesn’t give you the freedom to choose (and potentially stitch up other people) as in other player counts, it does give you more of a strategy as you’ll know what’s coming your way for the next couple of turns, more so for the solo game as the bot doesn’t take tiles. So if the luck of the multiplayer game doesn’t appeal, then maybe the two-player game will give you the strategy you're looking for.

Track, tracks and tracks oh my!

Once you’ve placed your tile, it’s time to advance on those oh-so-satisfying tracks. As mentioned earlier, each one will give you different benefits and bonuses as you move up them, and this in itself leads to a ton of replayability. One game you may choose to focus more on the tech track, and another you may go rover heavy. That’s not to say that they’re limiting, though, since you're usually getting up multiple tracks in a game, but invariably one or two are going to fall behind. My favorite part on each track is those wild spaces. When you hit or pass these spaces, you get to advance one space on a track (the same or different), and that can trigger some fantastic combos, especially if you can engineer it so you hit a couple of those spaces on a turn. They may not happen a lot in a game, or even at all, but when they do, it feels really good.

Something I have noticed, and I’d be interested in how this goes for you, is one of the technologies, more specifically the one that lets you place tiles anywhere on the board without them needing to be adjacent. Now, I don’t know if it’s the years of being told as a gamer that tiles “HAVE TO BE ADJACENT TO EACH OTHER” that means my brain can’t comprehend that I’m now allowed to break this well-ingrained rule. So much so that even though I’ve unlocked it on many occasions, I’ve taken advantage of it only once! On said occasion, it completely messed me up because now I had to try and deal with two poorly placed sets of tiles instead of my usual one. I know other people I’ve played with have forgotten to use it as well, and they are a lot smarter than me with better spatial awareness, so I’d like to see how often other people take advantage of this one.

“I think we should see other planets”

Each of the planet and corporation boards has its own unique map and tracks on their reverse side. I’ve not delved into every one of these, and I’ve only played them solo, but they each bring their own weird and wonderful flavours to the game. On one of the corporation boards, rather than being a regular straight, this water track snakes through the others. Some planets have placement restrictions and a whole host of unique flavours.

The variants that I’ve played with have been fun in their own right, and each combination offers its own unique puzzle. Given that there are many potential combos, you're going to get your money's worth for the replayability here alone. However, I couldn’t speak to how balanced they’re going to be in multiplayer games. Because they are so wildly different, there’s got to be some kind of overpowered or difficult combination somewhere. If you are going to try these outside of the solo mode, I’d go into it letting people know that it may not be the most balanced game. That being said, if you fancy playing a game where you don’t really care who wins and just want to experiment with the combos, and all others are on the same page, then it’s fun seeing what the combos bring to the table.

The correlation between the private and shared objectives can sometimes contradict each other, with one telling you to have the largest area of a resource type and the other saying you need the smallest. It’s annoying, to say the least, because now you have to decide which one to go for rather than both of them, and it’s basically taking potential points away from you before you’ve even started. My advice would be to swap out one or both offenders until you have a situation where you can reasonably achieve all of them, just to make things fairer.

When you first suggest playing Planet Unknown and you present people with that huge box, it's not uncommon for them to look at you with a face full of existential dread as they wonder what they’ve let themselves in for. Once you get into it, though, they soon realize that what they’ve actually let themselves in for is a pretty straightforward and, more importantly, fun planet-building polyomino game.

Right, I’m off to spin Susan… not the lazy Susan in the game, my friend Susan. She really loves those roundabouts at the park.