Earth Board Game Review
When Earth first released, a friend of mine picked it up and introduced it to me – I thought it was a really good experience, but got beat so bad at the time that I didn’t really want to keep playing. When attending GenCon 2025, we popped into the InsideUp Games room to check out their latest expansion that should deliver in a few months called Earth: Animal Kingdom, and after a few demo rounds, I decided I wanted to give Earth another try. While the outcome seems to be much the same – my wife kills me in this game – I’ve come to enjoy the turn-to-turn mechanisms at play, and now I cannot wait for more Earth content to become available.
In a future article, I will touch on the first expansion for the game, Abundance, which I actually think is a must own if you play this at larger player counts. That said, I might reference it a few times throughout as I pick out a few negative elements in the base game that I feel Abundance rectifies.
On Earth, players will be placing flora cards into a 4×4 tableau to hopefully score as many points as possible at the end of the game. While there are a variety of cards, most will have some type of plant on them and (generally, although not always) will provide base points for playing the card, an ability to grow the plant for more points, places for sprouts, and 0, 1 or 2 colored abilities. What cards you play will depend on the strategy you employ – some cards will provide high base points and end game scoring, but won’t give you ongoing benefits. Others have great ongoing benefits, but aren’t worth a lot of points or have great growth opportunities. Having a good mix is what will be the key to victory, and I think that is what makes this game so compelling to me.
At the start of a turn, players will choose one of 4 actions, providing themselves a major benefit, and every other player a minor benefit. When those benefits are resolved, all players will then go through their tableau activating any abilities of the action color chosen, gaining a variety of benefits along the way.
Everything on Earth can be earned and spent, including growing flora. Soil is the primary resource you will spend, the cost for the cards you play. But sprouts that you earn can be spent to activate abilities, as can the growth on your flora cards. Choosing when to gain and when to use these different resources, and how to maximize them, is what I am still learning to perfect.
For example, if you have a lot of “Spend Growth” actions, you might want to have cards that provide you growth! Not only will you need the growth so it can be spent, but you’ll earn more points for completing growth on your cards (one point per growth, or a few additional points if fully grown). The same can be said for sprouts: they are a great resource to use to get abilities, but they are also worth one point each if still in your tableau at the end of the game. So again, if you have cards that require sprouts to spend, make sure you balance that with cards that give sprouts.
Your basic actions help as well. In various combinations they can provide soil and compost, sprouts and soil, the ability to grow and get cards, and the ability to draw cards and earn growth for your flora. Ultimately, though, your game will live and die with your ability to balance all the various aspects that earn you points.
In one game, for example, I had too many cards that gave me the growth ability; by about the ¾ mark of the game, I had no additional room for growth, and was wasting these cards when activating my tableau. Obviously, I had played two many growth cards, and should have been playing other things instead.
The base game of Earth suffers from two problems, one rectified by the Abundance expansion, and the other isn’t the game’s fault as much as the players you play with. Let’s dive into that first. On Earth, you can get an astronomical number of cards, and if you are playing with people who take forever on their turns, giving them 10+ cards isn’t going to help that problem.
I love my wife, but she takes a LONG time taking turns in this game as she decides which cards to play. That works out for her, though, as she has always won; but that doesn’t make the game shorter. Just be aware that if you have people in your group who struggle with decision making on their turns, this game will be a lot longer than it needs to be.
The second issue is a bigger (although not frequent) problem in my opinion, and one reason I recommend picking up the Abundance Expansion. You’ll be pulling a lot of cards into your hand throughout the game, and you would think logically you’d always have what you need. But as you creep towards the end of the game and are working on your last few card plays, you will quickly realize that you don’t have the card you need to squeeze a few more important points out of your tableau.
Perhaps you need a mushroom card for one of your end-game scoring cards, or need a little extra growth to take advantage of one more tableau activation. For me, it was needing a card with a base value over 3 – I needed one more to meet the central objective (there are a few point rewards to compete for) and score some serious points, but I didn’t have one in my hand. Without the Abundance expansion, it was just a (as my kids put it) sucks-to-suck situation. With the Abundance expansion, I was able to use a seed token to search the deck of a card for one I wanted. I’ll discuss how this works at length in my review of Abundance, but it makes the end game experience so much more enjoyable and a lot less lucky.
That said, even without Abundance, I think Earth is still a fantastic game. Having Abundance mixed in makes this a 10/10 experience in my opinion, but without it I’d still say this is a solid 9 or 9.5 (we don’t score games here on the site for various reasons)! The reason I say that is that when dealing with those end-game frustrations about not having the cards you need, there is probably a turn or two you can look back on and realize you made a mistake: perhaps you composted a card you shouldn’t have, or played a card that would have been better left in your hand. While luck will play a role in that moment – drawing cards and hoping you get what you need – there are often things you could have done to at least limit the end-game damage that a bad card draw inflicts on you.
And even then, that issue isn’t something that pops up every game. We just want to be sure we note that it CAN happen, so don’t be surprised if it does. Still, if you enjoy tableau building and creating great synergies that reward lots of resources, Earth could be your favorite game if you give it a go! It is one of the best tableau building games ever designed.
Article By Adam Roffel
