Urtis Šulinskas. Art by Sabrina Miramon. Blue Orange, 2018.
2-4 players | 30- 45 minutes | Age 8+
Planet is a tactile game in which players build their own individual world by selecting vibrantly coloured tiles containing different biomes: ocean, desert, mountain ranges, forest and glaciers. Each player also has an individual objective card and is aiming to collect as many of their specific biome tiles as possible in order to score extra points at the end of the game. Animal cards are also obtainable throughout the game, and the player must have the largest biome relevant to that animal to win the card. At the end of the game, the winner is the player who has accumulated the most points, through their personal objective and through their quantity of animal cards. The card layout is reasonably long so requires around a one-meter length table or floor space.
The game is competitive and allows for the players to deny others tiles of certain biomes. However, this directly competitive element is usually overlooked by the personal objective taking top priority for the player as they focus on building their own planet. Tactics are also made harder by the design of the game. The maximum number of players is 4 and, on each turn, there are 5 tiles to choose from. Therefore, the last player to pick still has a choice of tile. The game isn’t focussed on destroying each other’s chances, rather on individually creating a habitable planet that can gain the most points.
As there are two elements of focus: the objective card and animal cards, this could lead players to stray away from creating a diverse planet, to focus on solely collecting a specific biome. Also, as there are many animal cards which aren’t played in each game this could occasionally lead to a lack of diversity depending on how the cards have been drawn.
Once an animal card has been won, the player has no more responsibility to maintain that card. The game focuses on creating an ideal planet which doesn’t encounter any hostilities: all outcomes are based on the players’ choices and are suggested to result in stable habitats. To create a more realistic representation of how a planet operates, a die which contains natural disasters or unexpected events which compromise a player’s ecosystem could be rolled at intervals throughout the game, disrupting any tactics a player has or to encourage greater diversity on their planet. Despite its limitations, Planet encourages the player to create their own diverse planet that is capable of supporting life.
Planet raises significant questions about how board games construct ecological knowledge and human relationships with the more-than-human world. The game operates at the planetary scale since players hold an entire globe in their hands. In so doing, Planet literalises what Latour (2018) calls the Galilean conception of the earth: an objectified planet seen from an external, transcendent vantage point. This is the perspective of the ‘god game’, a genre that accords human players mastery over the conditions of life itself. Yet the randomised allocation of habitat tiles and scoring cards frustrates this mastery, denying a straightforward management logic and producing planetary outcomes shaped as much by contingency as by player decision. In this respect, Planet echoes the kind of scalar thinking Timothy Clark (2015) associates with confronting the Anthropocene: the rules require players to think about the conditions for life at the level of the biome and the self-regulating system, broadly aligning with what Lovelock and Margulis called the Gaia hypothesis: the earth as a complex system oriented toward the maintenance of life. If Photosynthesis positions players within the subjectivity of a tree species, Planet asks them to inhabit the subjectivity of Gaia. The game’s most significant ecological limitation, however, is that there are no people. The completed planet is an idealized blue and green globe in which each biome is free from human habitation and interference, even as a human agent manages the placement of its continents and animals. This encapsulates a tension common to ‘nature’ board games: the exhortation to identify with a more-than-human world while simultaneously idealizing that world as separate from humans. Planet misses an opportunity to reveal what the climate crisis has made unavoidable, that the human and the more-than-human comprise a single, entangled field of relationships, and that there is no stable nature independent of the terrestrial (Latour 2018; Germaine 2022).
References
Germaine, C. 2022. ‘Nature Games in a Time of Climate Crisis’. In Germaine, C. and Wake, P. (eds.) Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 143–162.
Latour, B. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Adapted from the Ecogame Ludography entry written by Seth Etchells, Charlotte Gislam, Lucy Roberts, Chloé Germaine, Paul Wake and Jack Warren.