I had mixed feelings on TM when I played it. In Gaia Project, Gaia planets are a new planet type, removed from this ring, that is equally terraformable to all races. There is a huge amount to explore and challenge gamers with every play, a testament to the high quality of the original design.

It feels very complete. I don’t think I’d buy this game for solitaire play alone (although that’s something I would say about virtually any game), but now that I have the game, I have and will continue to play it that way. These terrain tokens were double-sided, and it was often a pain to find the right token to place there. The alien races are hidden behind a cloak of unintelligible consonant clusters that mean nothing (as these races, with the exception of Terrans, don’t appear under that name anywhere else), which can make referencing them difficult from game to game. There's a problem loading this menu right now.

Players set their buildings on their individual faction boards, choose starting locations on the main board, and in reverse turn order choose a round booster for the first round.

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2018. Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2020.

sign me up. The first reactions to a second edition or a game derived from a much beloved title usually fall on the polar opposites of the excitement spectrum.

iSlaytheDragon would like to thank Z-Man Games for providing us with a copy of Gaia Project for review. With these caveats out of the way, if you like heavy Euro games, and especially if you like resource-management games, run, don’t walk–you will love Gaia Project.

I do love the wooden pieces in Terra Mystica (hard to take the Euro out of this gamer), but the plastic pieces included in Gaia Project fit the space theme better, and they are sturdy and well detailed.
It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.

It helps, too, that I have a friend who already owns Terra Mystica and have the Terra Mystica app. But for the orange pieces they gave me one fewer mine and one more trading station. I’m not always a fan of asymmetry, but I love it in Gaia Project because it brings new trade-offs to the fore in each game. If gamers soured on Terra Mystica for its fixed board and steep learning curve, the rules have been simplified and streamlined, while still retaining a heavy strategy experience. It’s the futuristic, space colonization younger brother of Terra Mystica.

High praise!

Players earn points primarily by forming federations (linking their buildings on the board),  climbing up technology tracks and taking technology tiles, working toward the end-game objectives, and scoring the round’s bonus.

The problem for me is that Terra Mystica came first.

Do we want to put the effort into learning it or stick with Terra Mystica and spend the time we would use exploring Gaia Project to explore a completely new game. As a science fiction, space exploration and colonization game, Gaia Project works exceptionally well with the theme. Gaia Project, to me, is an excellent new direction for Terra Mystica. That said, almost everything else of the game is an improvement (except the art, imo). Depending on how close a planet’s type is to the species a player has selected, they’ll need to make the newly colonized planet habitable.

I agree about the lore: I do miss the easy identification of one race with another. The cult tracks of Ye Olde Terra Mystica have been combined with the shovel and shipping tracks that were on individual player boards into a new technology board with six different technology tracks: terraforming (~shovels), navigation (~shipping), artificial intelligence (get QICs), gaiaforming (for Gaia Projects), economy (boosts to income), and science (more knowledge income) . The 1-4 player range for Gaia Project is a slight downscale from the 2-5 for Terra Mystica. I think I prefer Gaia Project’s simplification of adjacency here, even if the gaps between planets make it harder to terraform at the start of the game. A Game of Thrones: Mother of Dragons #UpliftAndrew, Complete Listing (temporarily unavailable), Ruel’s Rundown, September 23, 2020: Three Games I’ve Enjoyed, Ruel’s Rundown, September 9, 2020: Three Games I’ve Enjoyed, Ruel’s Rundown, August 27, 2020: Three Games I’ve Enjoyed, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, Use a once-per-round “power action,” making it unavailable to other players, Use a once-per-round, player-specific special action. Lots of variety and opportunities to customize Yet Gaia Project both is and isn’t just Terra Mystica in space. I do wish that the new Kickstarter fad of including a custom insert were applied to this game.


For me, after setup (which probably takes ten to fifteen minutes), I’m able to complete a game in around fifty minutes, which is a satisfying length.

As much as I usually don’t care about theme in the games I play, Gaia Project takes “not caring about the theme” a little too far. (They seem to have acclimated on their own–I had given up trying to straighten them.) Perhaps the biggest revamp from Terra Mystica, though, is the technology board.

This was helpful for him, at least.

And the map isn’t as cutthroat as I’d like because the planets are far away and QIC’s give you more options to expand. Everything in this box is designed to go the distance. The rulebook makes no effort to explain the races of the game to players, or the various technologies, or…much of anything that would imbue the game with thematic interest. The Gaia Project step happens in every round, but it’s easy to ignore if you’re not participating in the gaiaforming track. Players score end-game points for how far they’ve climbed up the technology tracks, for leftover resources, and for their position in the end-game scoring objectives. The game also offers players a new action, the titular “Gaia Project,” which allows players to transform the uninhabitable Transdim planets on the board into Gaia planets.

Players who “wing it” from round to round will not be successful.

One of my favorite parts of the game, however, is Gaia planets themselves.

Frequency

This is a crunchy, heavy strategy game that'll take a few hours to learn from the rulebook (or an hour if someone teaches you), and it typically takes 2.5-3.5 hours to play a 3 or 4 player game. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Aside from being difficult to teach, Gaia Project is a game that revels in its immensity.

Rather than favor tiles always corresponding to one cult track, in Gaia Project, the different technologies (nine in all) are randomly assigned to the different tracks, with three technology tiles offering a boost along a track of the player’s choosing. Forming federations (“towns” in Terra Mystica parlance) is also made simpler and clearly marked on the board using satellites, which players pay for by removing power from their power cycle.

Your alien race is getting the expansionist itch, so it’s time to take to the stars!

There are also ample components in the box for every game situation I’ve encountered. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s not a game to casually play. As I mentioned earlier, there are fourteen distinct races and ten board tiles in the game, making each setup unique. Also appreciated is the inclusion of plastic miniature buildings. In any case, the complexity in this step is one of my least favorite parts of the game.

Really elegant game for its weight.

This is a major resource management aspect of the game as building and upgrading near other players in just the right way maximizes the Power received while minimizing giving Power. Increased complexity recommended mainly for hobbyists. When I first saw the illustrations for the game on Board Game Geek, I was disappointed. In reality, every game has some negatives, but at every moment to analyze those for Gaia Project, the same thought was “It’s just not that big a deal.” The biggest complaint could still be one of no direct player interaction, but that’s expected for this title and not really anything that was truly missing. As in Terra Mystica, there’s a “wheel” of terraforming, and each race has three rings, so to speak, of terraforming neighbors, types that are one, two, or three steps away. There are six technology tracks in Gaia Project, which grant players abilities the farther they climb them. The QIC cubes are super cool–it’s amazing that a resource that tiny has so much detail on it.

This is annoying, but not a deal breaker–it’s not as dire here when buildings slip as when your cubes shift in Terraforming Mars. There’s nothing to latch onto with these aliens whereas the races in Terra Mystica are easy to identify. I will also say that I’ve played the game with one, three, and four players, and it works equally well at all of these counts.



These are major rule-breaking changes that allow a race to gain an advantage in some situations and make them more limited in others. This process involves some explanation, and it can also be unclear to players who are learning the game what the benefits of Gaia Projects are.


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