Plutocracy

When people ask whether crowdfunding has me repeatedly running into walls, here is a resounding answer: Plutocracy. Thankfully it was cheap, because its theme and concept are exactly the sort of bait I dive into headfirst. Even the comic-book cover does its job well; shame the interior panels look as though my son painted them with watercolours.

At its core is time management, in a way that reminded me of auZtralia, alongside rotating planets. The idea is to exploit their rotation to take shortcuts and organise your moves efficiently. On paper, it is gorgeous: a spacefaring programming race on a changing map.

There is also area majority and market manipulation, so in theory players compete for influence and over the goods markets. In practice, though, the interaction and the choices quickly narrow into a dry optimisation exercise. There is essentially one correct path, and especially in the fixed/balanced setup, turn order seems to determine the winner more or less outright. Well done: a game about planetary orbits that ends up running on rails.

It is a real shame, because with a few additions and changes—multiple goods markets per planet, different distances, and better timing for the rotation—it could have become a respectable just-another euro. As it stands, the only thrill is having played it and then reading reviews and watching videos that insist there is life on Mars, or at least depth greater than the thickness of the paper it was printed on. Hard pass.