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Unsettled: Framework And Planets is a cooperative game for 2-4 players. You are scientists on the spaceship Scarab with your robot Luna. Everything goes pear-shaped, and you crash land on a planet. You have to survive the strange environment and find a way to get back off the planet.
The base game comes with two planet boxes, Wenora and Grakkis, and more planets are available, too, but as expansions. Part of the fun in Unsettled is landing on a new planet and exploring where you’ve landed.
How Does It Play
You start the game with three dice, all set to 2. These dice are never rolled but pipped up and down—normally down—as you take actions. On your turn, you have to take two actions from the range available; then, your final dice has to be used to rest, which normally pips it up by one point. If your dice reaches 0 you can still take actions, but they take you an extra time. Which is bad.
To take an action, you place your cube on an action space, either on your board, on one of the environment cards, on the resource board, or on Luna’s special action, which changes from planet to planet. You can collect resources, or get Luna to do it for you, move to another environment card, maybe taking one of your pals along for the ride, push up your insight which allows you to gain cards that give you extra powers, make a discovery which can eventually get you another cool power, remove a distress card from someone on your space, and you can rest.
There are also loads of free actions which I won’t go into here. On your turn, you also get a free move action, and you also get to move Luna one space.
Whenever you move onto a facedown environment card, you turn it face up and deal with the consequences.
The next player then takes their turn. Unlike most cooperative games, the game never gets a turn to do its bad, evil deeds. That’s not to say that bad things don’t happen: they do, but it's throughout the game.
You have to complete numerous missions to reach your final aim of escaping the planet.
What’s Good About It
I love a good puzzly game, and Unsettled: Framework And Planets is a good puzzly game. There are many times when you think you can’t possibly win, but with a bit of craftiness, you can occasionally pull it round and be victorious. But you will have to cooperate. If you play with a group of chums who all like to go off and do their own thing when playing cooperative games, essentially they don’t tend to cooperate very much, then this game won’t be for you. You will die very quickly. You have to work closely together, focussing on who is going to do which part of each mission. Your actions can sometimes benefit other players, so discussions about what you are going to do will pay dividends.
In Unsettled: Framework And Planets , I love opening a new planet box and finding out the new play mechanics. Planet 001 Wenora involves a fungal planet, where getting infected by spores can be beneficial. Planet 002 Grakkis has you battling a storm and gigantic creatures. I have also played one of the later planets that involves swinging around like Tarzan. As you can see, each planet is very different.
I have heard from other reviewers that the writing is a strong point. I think it is a taste thing. For me, it was fine. I didn’t find it funny, but I know that others did.
Any Problems?
As with any mission-based game, some of the missions are not as good as the others. The best ones are the ones that give you a card layout of the environment cards that fit perfectly with the theme. The worst ones are the ones where you feel like you’ve got next to no chance of winning it the first time you play unless you’re very lucky, so you play it again with your newly acquired knowledge and win it easily.
Components
The components are generally excellent. The game comes with Game Trayz and is very easy to set up and tear down: just pull out four trays with the majority of the components, then set up your planet. You have dual-layer player board, which helps you hold your dice and a couple of other cubes. It all looks very posh.
One very minor downside to the components is the miniatures of the players and Luna. They’re not the greatest.
One more very minor downside is the circular tokens that represent your character’s face. They look suspiciously like Kickstarter backers. It’s not a good look. An add-on pack came with the original Kickstarter that gave you even more of these tokens. One was a cat. One was a dog. The others, again, looked like Kickstarter backers. Why didn’t they go for it and do gerbils, ferrets, etc. Animals or other stupid stuff would have been fun. More Kickstarter backers was something I didn’t need.
Oh, and the box looks like a box for a stereo.
Conclusion
After my first game, I enjoyed the mission, but I wasn’t convinced I wanted to play it again, which would have hampered the game’s replayability. I
persevered and played it again, and the randomness of the environment cards mixed with the new powers we acquired from cards gave the mission a completely different feel and made it a different puzzle.
The main boost to the replayability of the game is the other planet expansions. There are also a couple of other expansions: Module Specializations and Module Fascinations, which make the players asymmetric.
Overall, Unsettled: Framework And Planets is a very enjoyable game that’s not too difficult on the base difficulty level, but if you feel like a change, there are easier and harder options. If you like puzzly cooperative games, where you have to work together, this is worth giving a try.
