Planta Nubo

With Devir publishing and Keller, Ode and Uwe on the design team, Planta Nubo looks like the sort of euro people ought to be talking about. It has a full, inviting presence on the table, and its collection of systems makes a persuasive first case. The promise, regrettably, is sturdier than the finished game.

At its centre is an action grid married to a 3-D Tetris-like spatial puzzle: choose actions, build out your machinery and farms, then make the whole arrangement fit. Energy management is the cleverest part of the package, giving choices a genuine direction rather than merely supplying another track to move a marker along.

Player interaction mostly sits in the timing of extensions: take one when it appears, before somebody else does or before the opportunity stops being useful. That neatly explains the design's desire to push immediate decisions rather than let everyone buy later at leisure. The machinery and farm cards, however, do not appear to have received equal attention in balancing; some are plainly better than others, and the starting options in particular can produce markedly uneven beginnings.

The trouble is not that Planta Nubo lacks things to do. It gives you plenty, continually, and with so little pressure that the whole exercise can feel oddly loose. It is handsome. So is a conservatory display. The rulebook seems to regard hunting for icon explanations as part of the experience, while the advertised 30 minutes sounds more like the time allocated to that hunt than to a game which, with the teach, is certainly over two hours. I did not dislike it, but Planta Nubo is a pleasant euro that leaves the mind almost as soon as it leaves the table.