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Overview

One Earth is about commanding a country, trying to be the richest while also making sure the Earth doesn’t blow up from too much of everyone’s emissions.

There are a couple of game modes: A Standard Mode, an Advanced Mode, and a 1-2 Player mode. For the sake of this review, we’re mostly covering the Advanced Mode, which includes Asymmetry, Resolution Voting, and more balanced gameplay. The Standard Mode and 1-2 Player mode will be touched on in the Cons and Final Thoughts below.

How to Play

Goal of the game is to get the most victory points come game end, which will be mostly the value of your nation’s prosperity, which you get by buying Project cards to permanently increase it. You also get more points end game the more different types of Projects your country has bought. For game end, in a 4 player game, that happens when any player hits 20 prosperity, then you finish up the round then tally up points.

Sounds simple, but this is the one earth we’re playing on, so if get too polluted, the game can end and no one will win! See when you buy some things, like UHHH A COAL FACTORY (cheap to buy hehe), its gonna boost your emissions by a butt ton, but also global emissions, which is everyone’s emissions added up. If that global emissions hits 30 or more, the earth blows up, yep, the game ends immediately and pretty much everyone loses… except for the person with the lowest emissions!

One other way for trigger this “pretty much everyone loses” state is if you can’t draw any more CRITICAL cards. These are things you gotta flip if global emissions are in the RED (20+). If emissions are between 10-19, you’ll flip a DANGER card.

All you do on your turn is 2 things.

1. Get your income, which is your prosperity level.

2. Buy things. Up to 2 projects, then 1 of other cards called Climate Policies and Technologies (explained below).

When you buy a project, just pay the cost, then put it in front of you, then change your player prosperity and emissions properly- don’t forget your contribution to global emissions! Besides projects, you can get climate policies, which is literally just paying a bunch of money and reducing your emissions by an amount… which also decreases global emissions. The technology cards you can also buy are a bit more special, which are modifiers for projects. You can use it up to 2 projects, you have to play it on at least one project you’ve built. It can be played on an opponent for the second usage.

Wait, why would you ever play a technology on someone else? Cause you can trade money freely during your turn, so you can make tons of deals.

That’s the bare basics! More on the U.N. below.

Pros

One Earth looks incredibly vibrant! There’s colorful vector art everywhere, with the colors just making sense: anything related to alternative energy is a happy, light blue, while the fossil fuel related stuff is more sinister at a dark red.

Cards are easy to read, with especially the symbols everywhere making sense. There’s some nice tidbits on every single project for educational purposes, and definitely cement the pursuit of green energy idea!

Learning the game is generally good, where the rulebook flows well, with diagrams everywhere, and great use of colors to divide up ideas. Plus, if you really want to play with non-board gamer friends/family, the Standard mode is a nice option.

For gameplay pros, where One Earth has a nice balance between upgrading your prosperity and keeping your emissions low. You want your nation to be super rich, but then by buying certain projects, or by disregarding environmentally friendly technologies or climate policies, you can get punished.

Punished? Well remember the CRITICAL/DANGER cards you flip at the end of rounds if Earth’s health is in the gutter? Well those will typically punish the highest emitter, while also sometimes helping the lowest emitter. To add salt to the wound of being the biggest farter, you get SANCTIONED for being that while global emissions is above 21.

As such, buying in One Earth is a nice tradeoff between going for really big jumps in emissions, and risking the emission fallout, or playing slower and safer, maybe trying to buy up low emission areas or ZERO emission areas, and then upgrading them through technology.

Once comfortable with the cards, you’ll know that, oh, I can play safe by buying a windmill early, then gobbling up a tech that doubles it’s output, and then when I buy the next windmill, my tech will help that one! You can do something similar for Fossil Fuel projects, where you just reduce their carbon output, woohoo! You’re never gonna just ignore projects, because you’re trying to get every project category come end game, since that’s more points.

There’s really that tableau builder progression, where eventually your built projects will ramp you up to double digits of prosperity aka income a turn. But then there’s only limited amounts of technologies and climate policies to buff your current projects, so you really want to grab those before the game ends… or maybe you just buy more projects?

But what makes One Earth REALLY come alive is the room for politics, namely how every player is interlinked. You’re already all bound together by the global emissions, but there’s this tiny little rule that on your turn, that you can exchange money however you want, which to conniving moments of:

- Convince someone else to fund your technology, so you use it on both you and them!

- Ask someone to lend you 2 gold to buy a project now, and you pay them back double next turn!

- Threaten to buy the LAST climate change card so opponents will stay as the highest emitter!

The list to wheel and deal is surprisingly good, as you navigate between emissions, the little engines people are going for, and the limited technology and climate change cards in the game. But the most thematic layer to this politics is the United Nations, where at the end of every round, whoever is the highest emitter if global emissions are above 21, gets smacked with a sanction, to cap their income to 4, and possibly make them discard their highest emitting project.

Again, negotiation comes in, where you way to try to convince other players: “I know I’ve been a bad boy… but next turn, I promise you we’re gonna spend our money to turn our country around with Carbon Capture and Reforestation, so I NEED the money, so don’t sanction me!”

Of course, convincing your friends isn’t always that easy, and you may need to promise them some coin to take off the sanction.

That’s not even the biggest pro about the U.N.. The big thing is that the U.N. has players voting AGAIN on resolution cards, which affect EVERYONE, and will be possibly huge swings to the game, and demands politicking to the extreme.

If you got the first player token, you look through a deck and pick ANY resolution you want, ranging from helping everyone with technology, penalizing everyone for emitting a lot, or even straight up banning coal usage for the rest of the game.

There’s also a couple of nice wrinkles in the voting system, where when you vote yes, you use 1 out of the 4 vote tokens that you have for the entire game. And if you pass resolutions, you get 1 point if your token is on that card. If you vote no and the resolution doesn’t pass, you get 2 money. So you really can’t be throwing out yes votes wherever, and when you do, you may need to convince/bribe other people to vote with you, because otherwise they might just vote no and get 2 money.

When there’s a tie is when things get interesting, where you try to convince a non-player country, so basically just bribing a bunch of third world countries or something, to take your side. Highest bribe gets that side’s vote!

Wow, so since this U.N. voting is at the end of the round, that means you MIGHT want to save money and not spend it all on your turn if you things will get a little hairy with the vote here.

And we gotta give a really fun shoutout to colonizing mars! Yep, you can get aboard Noah’s Ark, where to fund that hilarity, you also need money come end turn! It just requires players to throw money at it, to get it to 8 coins; and if you contributed 3 or more, when earth blows up hitting 30+ global emissions, you don’t lose the game… cause you’re on freaking mars!

There’s only ONE copy of each resolution in the game, and remember, you look through the deck and pick one, so there’s counterplay in scanning the board and possibly wasting resolutions that others might find useful on a later turn. Resolutions even affect with cards that aren’t directly upgrade-able, like buffing schools permanently, so One Earth really rewards you for getting comfortable with playing around the 9 agendas.

The thing that really seals all of the politic play together is the asymmetry, where there’s 6 different leader characters in the game, that all are pushing in slightly different directions for their end game scoring to make voting motivations interesting.

The Energy Tycoon just loves fossil fuel projects to get 5 extra points out of them… well maybe you’ll vote for them to stay sanctioned?

Or the environmentalist is frequently trying to do sneaky things in the name of justice to get their emissions the lowest for more points end game!

The one that is the most politically charged is the diplomat, who really encourages some creative negotiating. See, at the end of the game, she gets 2 extra victory points for each Resolution she helped passed, meaning 3 points instead of the normal 1. Wow, this is really good, this diplomat usually wants to keep money on hand to convince others to vote with her.

Finally, the gameplay meets the theme pretty much everywhere in an environmentally conscious game called One Earth. Ok, disclaimer, of course things on our complex floating rock are not integers in prosperity or emissions that have 0 externalities.

Cons

Before we begin, yes, we have a pre-production copy. So we’re assuming many things for components will get cleaned up, like us not having an insert and pretty shoddy Voting and Emissions tokens.

The rulebook has some slight confusion with its use of (!) to divide the Advanced and Standard Mode, where there’s some current typos to make that quite confusing. Or how there’s an area that if the majority of the group agrees to sanction a player, they keep the sanction card. But then if the minority agrees NOT to sanction the player, discard the sanction. So what happens if you’re playing with 4 players, and the vote is tied! Then what happens? We’re assuming that the player keeps the sanction.

Then the reference card is missing the important ability on your turn to clear all of the projects by spending 2 money, which doesn’t sound initially that useful, but is incredible late game to get the last projects you needed. Plus things are ridiculously small on this reference, especially the scoring table, so this card could have just been much bigger.

There’s some symbol wonkiness, with the game not fully utilizing its Prosperity and Emissions symbols on cards. Or how the board could have had some reminders for when Sanctions happen, or how players get punished end game for having more than 5 personal emissions.

And then let’s talk about the technology and climate policy decks. They’re not really like decks in a normal sense, rather they’re all public and you have to sift through the deck any time you want to buy one. This is super clunky for newcomers, where even though these cards are simple, with duplicates (only 7 names to know), you’re gonna be fighting for reading privileges frequently during game. This could get helped by having another reference for these.

U.N. resolutions also have this “reading through deck” problem, where you sift through all 9 when picking one. These are definitely more complex than the technologies, leading to a bit of analysis paralysis to what is otherwise a fairly streamlined game. There’s the Going to Mars one that doesn’t require votes but instead money which requires careful thought, and Resolutions are all 1 time use, so if one gets rejected, its gone from the game forever, so you gotta pick the right one. Oh and picking the wrong resolution and having everyone else say no on it gives the 2 money and you 0 money so there’s also that.

One Earth wanted to give tons of options for Resolutions, but at the same time having a system that is clunky and daunting, especially for this game’s otherwise simple turns. Drawing 3 or 4 resolution cards, then picking one would have worked fine, especially for newcomers to the advanced game mode. Then Colonizing Mars could always be an option for players to try to pass, since its actually pretty central to some strategies.

Now to gameplay cons, so let’s get have our first one with a Resolution: Mandatory Foreign Aid. If anyone is above 14 prosperity, it forces the player with highest prosperity to give 5 money to the player or players with the lowest prosperity. This can really mess up the highest prosperity player when there’s multiple players with the lowest prosperity, as giving away 10 money away is brutal on a Resolution that has no voting process. Perhaps this could have some modified vote, or pay out less money if you have multiple lowest prosperity players.

As for balance, its not quite here with the leaders, with the Entertainer being extremely strong for tempo, whereas the Military General is a little too prone to being sanctioned, due to his high emissions leaning playstyle. This doesn’t break the game too badly because of the political maneuvering, but the imbalance does hurt harder in a game of 5-7 rounds. The 2 player mode, which takes out the politics, cannot be played with the Entertainer for balance.

As for time length, the multiplayer advanced mode of this game DEFINITELY does not run true to time. Instead of 20-40 minutes, its more like 1-2 hours, depending on how much your group wants to negotiate… after all you can make any deal.

And it’s not like there’s a lot of rounds either, its more from the game’s systems, like the negotiation, open information on each player, and resolution DECK dragging out each turn. You really don’t want to make bad deals because a little bit of money early game to get anyone’s engine going is HUGE, so you really don’t want to get ripped off. This isn’t a HUGE deal, just something the game should have been more transparent about, because this is just one of the game modes out of 3 in this box. Like if you buy this game only for 1-2 player, then yeah, the game is 20-30 minutes.

The last con is this 1-2 player mode, which is a traditional tableau builder with ZERO negotiation that is definitely a shell of the main game.You play against an automa who deletes the technology and climate change decks each turn. While this does a good job of keeping players on their feet, especially since he does random emissions spikes, the fact he’s randomly deleting these crucial cards at no cost to himself can really hurt certain leaders like the Scientist and Environmentalist. Plus, you can’t play the general or diplomat at all in this mode, and then the entertainer is just too strong in this mode… so you’re really left with 3 leaders which puts a big damper on replayability. While this mode works to get more comfortable with the game, its not something we would recommend buying One Earth for.

Oh, and then the multiplayer with 3 players is also super wack, because the voting just gets weird… like think of having to manipulate only one person’s votes to sway the group in your favor… works but not that interesting. The 4-5 player mode is the way to play this game.