Since I got back I’ve played a few of the Essen games, so here are my thoughts:
Humanity – Yoann Levet, published by Bombyx, 2-4 Players Age 14+
Humanity is a worker placement game in which you start with 2 workers in the form of astronauts, and will get a third during the game. It features a clever worker placement variant in which your workers are placed on non-exclusive spots around a circular central board. From where they are placed they can “see” two kinds of tiles on the board – a module tile which goes on their player board and a tunnel segment tile which goes in front of their play area.
The theme of the game is that you are building your own modules on Titan, a moon of Saturn; the modules net you basic resources – methane, ice and bugs- and later more sophisticated resources (worth there basic resources).
Tiles taken from the board are phased and replaced at the end of each round.
The twist in the game is that after all players have played their astronauts, the centre of the board, which shows an entrance into the spaceship holding the modules, swings clockwise. The number of spaces it swings is at least two but is determined by removing one available module, moving the others clockwise until they are pushed together, and then turning the board until the walkway entrance is up to the next available module. Any workers that the board entrance goes past are then returned to their players for use in the next round.
Workers may also be left near the player boards. The players boards consist of 9 starting tiles arranged in a 3×3 grid with 3 of them being land tiles which must be eemoved if you wish to make easy space for more modules. You may also extend your 3×3 grid with the modules you just bought.
Each module is rotatable. Instead of using your own astronauts to fetch modules and tunnels, you may rotate modules and land tiles anti-clockwise. Each worker allows you to rotate 90 degrees twice. You do this to either excavate the lab tiles (which require 4 turns to be removed) or to increase the amount of resources on your modules by 1 per rotation of 90.
In this way you invest workers to build up resources which are then used to pay for your new module tiles and tunnel segments. Each astronaut allows you to rotate twice in the beginning of the game, but interestingly the workers can be upgraded to allow 3 or 4 rotations by completing a square of 4 modules in 2 or 1 colours in your play area. This also earns you a VP. Other in-game VPs are earned by assembling greenhouses or meeting one of three objectives linked to modules or tunnels – but you can lose these objectives if someone later gets more of whatever the objective stipulates.
Tunnels are collected to give you bonuses – either to move your astronauts towards an entrance or rotate modules/land tiles – assembling together a 3-piece tunnel also earns you VPs. You may also earn research points which move you up a track and score you VPs depending on your position relative to other players.
What I thought (1 play only)
Unfortunately I didn’t like Humanity that much. While the design had some nice features, especially the multi-use astronauts and the roaring central board, the game featured some unintuitive or annoying rules which made gameplay more difficult without being fun. The main one of these was that the modules bought with astronauts had to be placed in the spot the astronauts had left. Thematically this makes no sense and in terms of planning, since modules are competed for, it lead to quite some frustration. Perhaps a house rule would resolve this but we didn’t try it There were other quirky rules, but that was the most irksome one which lead to quite some downtime: since you are in competition for modules, it is very easy to take a module someone else was planning for without doing it on purpose, although to be fair sometimes this is predictable (some objectives drive you to compete for certain modules). The artwork was thematic but got a little bit in the way of the iconography and the theme of the game didn’t really shine through despite the very cute astronauts. The VPs earned on the research track are hidden behind a screen but I felt that this was unnecessary and could have been culled in development. The game dragged on too long due to a lot of downtime, and in fact we gave it up before finishing although there was an obvious winner.
Overall, I didn’t love the game and wouldn’t choose to play again.
Rating: neutral.
