Planta Nubo

With Devir producing it and Keller, Ode, and Uwe on the design team, I expected Planta Nubo to be one of those games everyone talks about. Instead, I found a pleasant euro with good ideas that ends up far more comfortable, and far less memorable, than its pedigree promised.

At its core, it mixes an action grid, a bit of three-dimensional Tetris, and a genuinely clever energy-management mechanism. You build and place things on your farm, trying to make use of space and the mechanisms available to you, while energy gives your choices useful direction. On paper, that mix has real potential.

In practice, though, the game rarely puts you under pressure. You constantly do lots of big, abundant things without feeling that you need to squeeze yourself or make especially painful decisions. The extension choices seem designed to push players into taking them when they appear rather than whenever they happen to have an action to spare; a sensible intention, except the balance among cards and farms does not always follow. Some are simply better than others, especially among the starting options, so that pressure becomes less of an interesting dilemma and more of a small reminder that someone forgot to bring scales into the greenhouse.

I will not say I did not have a good time. I just was not tearing my clothes apart over it either. And that advertised 30-minute duration presumably refers to the time spent hunting through the manual for icon explanations, not to the game itself: with the teach included, this is definitely a two-hours-plus affair. In the end, Planta Nubo is likeable, but for me, totally forgettable.