This is a sponsored post. Prototype featured.

How to Play

Goal is to have the most points end game, you get that from many areas, including: pursuing your company’s hidden goal, increase your stock, build stuff on planets, and get milestones for being the first to build a certain amount of things!

The two main ways to build up cash to do that is:

A) Build stuff on planets to increase income, and

B) Bring your freighters to planets to load them up with cubes, then sell each cube… for how much that cube is currently worth. Each color of cube’s value is going up and down throughout the game.

Let’s just get to each round: so first you’ll flip over 3 demand cards which tick demand up or down for a good, then flip a global event which is an effect for that round. Then, each players place their trade routes to see which planets their ships can go on that round. Then you draw cards. Then it’s the MAIN phase of the game where you can start buying a bajillion things, namely:

1. You can play cards from hand, paying the cost on the top left corner.

2. You can activate any cards’ ability you have in front of you (called Keep Cards).

3. Just buy stuff, e.g. buildings, ships, more trade routes, even hire someone to explore a new planet. You can only buy each building once a round, each planet can only have 1 type of building. Placing buildings typically increases production of the planet’s goods.

Once everyone has done that in clockwise order, then you also place ships in clockwise order, doing so one at a time, and once you place somewhere, you load 1 cube. But you don’t get the money yet- there’s another phase to play ATTACK cards from your hand on others! And these can be defended by the appropriate defense card.

THEN you unload all of your ships, grabbing money for each sold, and also get your current income. But keep all of those food cubes in a pile, because the POPULATION of earth is gonna go up for each of these shipped. Once the population goes to 20, it resets, and EVERY resource demand gets ticked up by 1!

Now its finally the end of the round- you replenish cubes of each planet, and pass the first player.

That’s the bare basics of the game! Like at its core, you just repeat this cycle of drawing a bunch of cards, buying a bunch of things, possibly playing attack cards on each other, then seeing what goods you ship. At the end of round 8, you count up all your points to see who wins!

Pros

First for components, these ships are really quite endearing in letting you put the cube inside of them! Money tokens are also awesome.

As for visuals, we quite appreciate seeing flavor text on literally all the cards- there’s over 200 cards that you can possibly draw and they all have at least something there with varied art. The 26 global events also have flavor text! Then, the resource symbols in this game make a lot of sense: see big arrow go up? That’s your stock.

So now onto gameplay pros, and first let’s talk about how the hand management meets the economic play. You always have a bunch of cards in hand every round, with a handful of varied abilities. Cards can make building cheaper, get you cheap freighters, or even straight up manipulate the global event deck!

The fact that you can discard cards for money lends you to be constantly unsure of ditching for cash, or playing it now, or saving it. For defend cards namely, you can save it for some protection, or discard it now to get cash to help your economy NOW.

Speaking of helping your economy, there’s a TON of ways to increase it. Every round, you have 4 different bulidings you CAN build, or more transport ships to ship more cubes every round. Or get trade routes to dock at more planets. Or if the board is a little too tight, you can invest in a new planet, of which YOU can immediately build something there, mwaahaha no one else can build a farm there now!

That gets us directly into the progression of Planet Trade, because you’re gonna start having bigger turns as the rounds go on. Demand go UP for everything, so each cube is worth more, everyone is slowly getting more freighters, and production is getting better, so the money starts pouring in!

You also see the side “+card” symbols on income? That means you get an ADDITIONAL card draw every round when you are on or pass it, so that’s a crazy boost in options. Its not surprising to have 30 or 40 plus credits mid-game, then just dumping them all for ships, buildings, upgrading buildings, you name it. This will get ya from 2 freighters to 12 by the end of the game, so you’ll be shipping like mad.

Investing in your company’s assets is also balanced with the ability to pay to increase your stock- I know a bit fishy because you’re the CEO of this company, but you can literally just get 2 VP by bumping stock by 2 every round and this also bumps your income by 2. You gotta find out what round you should start doing this.

So we just talked about all of the economic pros, but let’s get into how this game lets you interact.

Like, since milestones are first come first serve, and there’s a cap of ONE of each type of building per planet, you have to be mindful of what your opponents are building. Maybe you don’t care too much if they’re ahead if you have a bomb hehehehehe. You also don’t want to be mindlessly building up farms, because each farm increases food production which can let someone else build a settlement and spend your hard work of increased food production, and that player gets +3 income for doing so!

Another example is suddenly spiking demand for the goods you are position for to ship through event cards, as long as your opponents don’t ship as much as you this round. And you can’t trade amongst yourselves, but you can always ask someone to do something special on the board, like not going on a trade route or playing an attack card on another, since you CAN boost demand for their stuff if given the proper motivation.

The whole attack and defend dynamic really does twist the economic play too, because you always play attack cards AFTER doing all of your economic stuff. But attack cards COST money to play, so there’s an idea of maybe not going so hard on your economy to try to launch an attack against someone else.

This is where the mind games come in, because if you see someone end their buying phase with some cards in hand and a bunch of money, your eyebrows are gonna go up, because the attack is coming in? I think? Maybe they’re saving money and cards for next round?

If you’re really calculative, you can do the attack to “steal 2 money” from someone else, which sounds a bit trivial, but if you do it on a person going AFTER you in attacking order, they won’t have any money left to play their attacks!

To start wrapping up the pros, there’s a final cool shoutout of theme meeting gameplay in this game.

Food ends up functioning as a thematic way to just FEED humans back at earth with decent payouts, but loses its allure later in the game when people are a little too hoity-toity for some good old mickey d’s and want medicine uggghh who wants that.

Also shoutout to the global event deck for theme, because something like a fossil shortage for that round puts huge emphasis on shipping fossil fuel, embargos temporarily make something 0, and there can even be a baby boom to shoot up population! My favorite here is the war, which hurts everyone, but makes every single cube worth 1 more for that round! Yeah food, I’m looking at you you’re REALLY good during a war.

Final pro is that this game runs fairly true to time, the 2-4 hours checks out. The bulk of the game is actually in the buying phase when you choose to play or buy a bajillion things. At 3 players once comfortable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see games run under 2 hours.

Cons

Oh man, so this this cons section is pretty tricky and gonna be different from how we normally do it, even for prototypes, because the draft rulebook is written by a non-native English speaker, and really hard to understand. So, I had the honor of also getting to video chat with the designer, and I cleared up a bunch of questions about the game… but obviously you’re not really gonna be able to call the designer if you buy this game.

All I can say right now is that I know FOR sure this rulebook will look entirely different, the English and grammar mistakes on cards should get cleared up, and even a ton of visual stuff is gonna get cleaned up which will save us about 5 paragraphs or so in cons.

If you’re still curious, one visual issue is that keep and event cards look SOOO similar from the front, like just make the indicator circle at least different colors if the entire card layout is gonna be the same!

Let’s just dive right into gameplay cons then. The first one is the umbrella that there’s currently not the best incentives to actually attack each other, which is one of the key ideas of this game. The problem has its roots in how every attack card costs money, whereas you usually want to spend money to increase your economy, because this is an economic game.

What can make it worse, is that you can spend money to play the attack, then the attack can get blocked by a defend card. Of course that player had to spend money to defend, so they’re behind a little bit too, but you functionally just threw away cash!

Attacking cards are meant to be just tearing someone down, instead of building yourself up, in an economic game where you’re building a business with income spikes, so attacking isn’t really an optimal play. So, then what you can do is DISCARD the card for money, that is 2 money, which is actually too high of a number. If card discards were 1 money, that would give you less reason to just ditch attack cards for cold cash.

Then attacking cards should just be cheaper overall to play, to lower the barrier of engaging in this core mechanic. Think of an economic game with take-that cards, Catan, or maybe Dune Imperium is a better example. You already spent something to get the card, so playing it shouldn’t cost you more. Again, we’re not saying to make attacks free in Planet Trade, but at least cheaper. We can see why there wasn’t cheaper attacks in the game, because the global event war, so if attacks were made cheaper, the second line of War would have to be changed.

I’ve been told the numbers are getting tweaked, kind of like how we’ve found some weird imbalance with some cards: getting 5 money as a card when you can normally discard them for 2 is a +3 in power, or how… playing “cheap upgrade” to upgrade a settlement to a city for half cost is saving you 8 money which is a +6! Aaah, onwards to the next cons cause I’m not even sure how to evaluate card balance.

Before nitpicks, I do want to bring up the end goal cards, cause there’s 2 that caught our eye on balance. One is the mayor, which gives you 3 extra points per each city you own end game. To break it down, cities are a REALLY good building, where their total build path gives you 7 total income which will quickly get you to the “draw extra card range of income”, and cities are inherently worth 3 points by themselves. So getting a mayor is helping you with points with this thing that is ALREADY good to get. Contrast with the other ones, like trying to set up for a massive food haul last round which is hard to do. Or getting benefited for owning keep cards which cost money to play.

The one that really caught our eye (as in I had to play it and suffer) is the Evil Corporation, which is actually a cool idea. See, this card gets FLIPPED over at the beginning of the game when you’re dealt it, and your ability is that you gain 1 stock, which is 1 point, every time you successfully attack someone. Well, as said before, attacking people is definitely a little underpowered in this game… but then the attack card “Vandals” is FREE to play, and is pretty much free points for the Evil Corp, that should get looked into. The weird part for Evil Corp the second line, where you get +5 income for starting a war. Seems decent, right?

The problem is that there’s only 2 cards out of this 150 card event deck that let you trigger war. One of them lets you do just grab the War card for FIFTEEN credits which is insanely expensive. The other one lets you take it from the discard pile for only 5, but keep in mind that war card has to already be discarded at that point. And there’s 26 global events, you flip 1 over every round for an 8 round game, so no guarantees you’ll even get the war in your discard!

Judging on how War is such an interesting global event, it could be made more likely to trigger in each game, or add in more of this manipulate a global war card and make it cheaper to play, OR just completely change the bottom line of this evil corporation.

Nitpicks

Gold! It doesn’t really get enough usage to justify its entire track, because there are only 5 keep cards in the entire game that interact with it, and only 3 of those will actually let you ship it. There’s 66 keep cards instead of 150 events, so probabilities aren’t terrible in drawing a gold keep card, but its not unsurprising to play a game and have gold NEVER matter at all. This isn’t affecting our final score but it seems like gold should have been given more consideration seeing how it has a very interesting demand track.