Age of Wonders: Planetfall is a 4X video game from Paradox Interactive that came out in 2019 and, from my reading, had all of the trappings of that genre, from resource management to economic and military development to a tech tree. Hobby World published a board game adaptation from a first-time designer that borrows the art from the video game but has nothing more to do with it, slapping the IP on a bad Splendor clone that might be more fun to play if it didn’t try so hard to get the sci-fi art and theme involved in game play.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall has seven decks of cards representing the seven planets players will “explore” over the course of the game, with cards in each successive deck increasing in cost and value. Cards can require you spend either strength or energy, and they may have a minimum experience level before you’re allowed to purchase it. For each round, you shuffle one planet deck and deal either all of the cards (4-5 players) or all but three cards (2-3 players) to the center of the table in three rows, next to the operations board that shows levels I, II, and III; each card shows three levels of costs and they become slightly less expensive at higher levels.
Players will go twice per round, moving their ship to a card or a space on the operations board, resolving those, then repeating the cycle before all remaining cards are removed from the game to make room for the next planet. The turn order depends on what cards players chose in the last turn; you resolve cards left to right, starting with level I, and then move each player counter to the topmost empty spot on the ops board to show turn order for the next round. You can choose any card on any level as long as you have the resources and/or experience required to buy it; every deck has several “power-up” cards that just give you energy and maybe a victory point or two, and you can also choose one of the three spots on the operations board to get 5-7 free resources or victory points or experience, so you can’t end up without a legal play.
Each player has an individual player board with four tracks, three in the middle and a victory point track around the outside. Strength and energy are expendable resources; you spend them to gain cards, and each has a maximum you can get at one point. Experience and victory points never go down, with experience maxing out at 10 while VPs have no limit. You have to gain experience as the game progresses or you won’t be able to acquire valuable cards from later planets.
Most points in the game come from the VPs you get as you go from cards, but each game also begins with three goals (public objectives) players can shoot for, some of which are competitive (points for having the most of something) while some are open to everyone (e.g., one point for every strength you still have left at game end). A few cards also provide game-end bonuses, although those only appear in the last 2-3 decks so you can’t plan ahead too much for those.
It’s a light engine-builder along the lines of Splendor but with the sliding resource scales seen in dozens of other games, such as The White Castle and Khora. The art and card names are kind of a distraction here, and I didn’t feel the theme at all – the rulebook even talks about combat against a neutral opponent but that just means you can buy some cards with strength instead of energy. Instead, it’s Splendor in Space, except that game already exists in Space Explorers, which I think does a better job of grafting Splendor’s engine-building framework on to a space theme, and gets a little better with some of the expansions. I haven’t played the actual video game here, but from reading about it I don’t see where the connection is – this seems like an IP extension to cash in, without a lot of meat to the game behind it.