Another cooperative game: Vanished Planet

[dmaze]

A coworker dragged me off to a games part at one of his friends' houses last night. This turned out to be a geek circle that also wanted to play geek games, so it all worked out. Their filler game was Ricochet Robots which they played like Set which seemed to work reasonably.

Our main event, though, was Vanished Planet. Earth has unleashed the void and it's slowly spreading across the board; if you collectively do enough quests then you can defeat the void and recover Earth. It was a sound concept and we had fun playing, but the game did drag on a little.

The fundamental issue is that, once you get into the game, you get this giant pile of raw resources every turn. You can refine those into second-level and third-level items. But if what you want is a fourth-level item, and you're missing three first-level resources for it, you need to figure out what single second- or third-level item to try to trade for. And while you're trying to find your pants here everyone else is waiting.

So that ran a little long, but it was good company, and we did manage to win in the end (only sacrificing two of the six homeworlds in the process). Might be worth trying again, or automating somehow. But almost certainly a crowd worth visiting again.

Comments

[visage.livejournal.com]

I've played that a few times. With an analytical crowd, it quickly becomes a solved game, and then all you can do is crank up the difficulty level (which they've screwed up the rules for, IIRC)... at which you're playing the game of "optimize for the random draws you've gotten so far".

To me, it's an entertaining game to play once or twice, but not beyond that.