Wednesday, March 07, 2007

One less item off the ol' wishlist

I went to a boardgame meetup this evening, and managed to play a game that I've been eyeing for a while now: Vanished Planet.

I generally enjoy cooperative games, and this one had an intersting premise: What used to be Earth is now a horrific growing mass that is ever expanding into the fartherest reachest of space. 6 alien races must now band together to try and survive, whilst hoping to contain the monster.

Each player gets a chance to collect resources, trade with other players, and then move their ship whilst building all forms of advance technology to fulfil quests, and to delay the growth of the monster. Each player is threatened by a ever-enlarging tendril of the monster, though the rate of growth is slightly different for each player. Once the tendril over-runs a player's homeworld, they are considered to be eliminated from the game. Each player is simultaneously also trying to fulfil quests to earn victory points. There is an overall cumalative total that each player's completed quests would contribute to, and all must work together to combat the monster.

It was a fun game, and I enjoyed myself very much. We played this twice, and we were totally slaughtered in the first round, at normal difficulty. We took it down a notch, and only just barely squeezed a victory. I felt that the game did promote a sence of urgency and desperation, when you see that one player's homeworld was about to be swallowed, or if we knew that we had to finish a number of quests before we would even be close to winning. There is alot of interaction, as each player would trade resources, and also help each other out with the building of various technologies.

But I have to suspect the longevity of the game, as I think that some players may become bored with after a few plays of the game. The problem with cooperative games is that after a while, players know what to do to beat the system, and then the game loses its appeal after that. We managed to do much better in the second game, and I suspect that if the same group were to play a third or fourth time, we would have very little trouble with the game. As such, I've taken this game off my wishlist. Cos I know it's available if I want to play it again (it belongs to Adrian Peh), but I don't think it's a game I'd like to own.

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