Gaia Project

Since Gaia Project is the next online title we have our eye on, we first sat down for a tabletop game so we could see it in full 3D. Nobody in our group is a particular Terra Mystica fan—not that we hate it, but the unbalanced factions had put us off. With the basic recommended setup here, things ran much more smoothly.

The game was satisfyingly brain-burning: you are trying to set up your development properly and build toward your federations, while the choices on the board force you to carefully count out your next moves. The game did not feel chaotic or troublesome in its basic setup; rather, it felt like a Terra Mystica that has smoothed out its edges a little better.

Where I soured on it was the final scoring tiles. They were not especially conducive to interesting decisions, particularly the tile for the most satellites, which can push players into ridiculous federation builds purely to chase points. That is not the kind of interaction that makes a game livelier; it simply pulls the game toward an objective that did not feel especially elegant to me.

Final verdict: exactly the improved Terra Mystica experience I expected. Not great, not terrible. It is a nice mental exercise, but it remains fairly dry, and the most memorable moment of the session was that we nicknamed the AI cubes “mokoko,” because we had recently been hooked on Lost Ark.