Vanished Planet

I’ve had Vanished Planet for about a year and played it solo to get the mechanics down quite awhile ago. We decided to play this tonight during family game night. The premise is a world-consuming creature swallows Earth (center of the board) and is destroying everything in its path as it expands toward each player’s homeworld on the edge of the board. To win, everyone needs to work together to accomplish enough goals to send the creature packing.

It was looking pretty grim about two-thirds of the way through the game when we stopped for dinner. We had accomplished very few goals and it seemed like we were doomed. The game is rather tense and can appear to be hopeless at times. However, when we came back to the game, we discovered we were at the point in the game when we had considerable resources and were able to improve our position such that several of us could move easily around the board. This made accomplishing goals significantly easier.

Just as the creature was reaching for some of our homeworlds, we were able to send the creature away and claim victory. Two homeworlds were destroyed in the process. The boys and Jill enjoyed it. Jill, in particular, found it an interesting game. It was a little long for Logan.

Good game but you definitely need the player aids available on BGG. In particular, there is a sheet to keep track of your current resource production level. It’s a little better than the tally sheets that come with the game. There are also several sheets that break each of the technologies and upgrades into the basic resources needed to build them. This speeds up the game considerably. I only had one copy of these for this play but would recommend at least one copy to share between every 2 players.