Mi Tierra: New Era

When someone says “a farming euro for six players in under an hour”, I tend to put a large cross beside it before the box is even open. After rather too many games, that combination often suggests a product trying to squeeze everything into too little time. Mi Tierra: New Era is a welcome surprise, though: it arrives without making a fuss and proves to have more substance than its compact premise implies.

At heart, it is a production-based euro: straightforward, but not slight. You can build your game around crops, livestock, or a sensible mixture of both, and those different routes to victory leave enough room for an actual plan rather than asking everyone to perform the same chore in different colours.

At four, the interaction is notably open and forgiving. Everyone seems able to find a patch of space without being pressed too hard by the others. That makes it comfortable, perhaps a touch too comfortable, for a Tuesday after work; with five or six, I would expect the same framework to gain the pressure and bustle it rather wants.

The 2010 edition might well have belonged with those suspiciously hurried titles, but the 2016 edition adds four or five things that make the whole proposition feel considerably fairer. It will not shout to be noticed. It is simply very good, and likely better still when the table is full.