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Take Off
Around early 2022, I was introduced to a digital platform for games, known as Sovranti. This was a new challenger to Board Game Arena and Tabletopia, and implemented fully scripted games. I had a few conversations with their community team and started streaming with them on a regular basis. One of the early games which appeared there was Planet Unknown, a game published by as then unknown to me publisher, Adam’s Apple games. It was pitched to me as a tile placement game, with polyominos and tracks to bump up. Sounded pretty good to me, I thought, and settled in to play.
I came away from that stream thinking I'd played my game of the year. My word, Planet Unknown is fantastic. There is so much going on here and I couldn’t wait to play more. I ended up on a journey of trying to track down a copy of the game, which ended up with a friend ordering a deluxe copy in the States and shipping it across to me. Totally worth it, in my opinion! You can see the stream here if you like!
Planetary Exploration
The short rundown of the game is that on each turn, the active player will rotate the lazy Susan in the middle of the table and stop it so that each player has a choice between two tile shapes. Each of these tiles has two of the six terrains on it, and they will take one to place on their board. The terrains relate to the five tracks, which give each of their own different benefits. The sixth terrain is Energy, and will boost one track it’s connected to.
Of course, it can’t all go your way. Some tiles will rain down meteorites which will prevent you from scoring your completed line and column at the end of the game if it’s still on the board, so you need to send your rover out to pick them up, along with the life pods dropped to help colonise the planet.
What makes this game stand out is the high level of variability between each game. You get a choice of planets and corporations to play with in each game, and can mix and match as you want. You can have a basic game with the same single planet and corporation, or go nuts and have weird combinations that will trigger certain different effects as you use the tiles to your benefit.
Landing on the planet
Planet Unknown is a truly fantastic game, spiced up by a huge amount of variety, random events which can benefit or hinder your turns and a nice little gimmick in the lazy Susan for tile selection. I really love this game, and every time I play, I want to set up another game to try something different.
There’s a new Supermoon expansion coming soon, and I’m very excited to see what will be added to the already packed box.
