A good board game has many levels. Narrative layers surround and define the plot of a board game, while mechanical layers determine the action from moment to moment. More complex games have a rich strategic layer where players try to outsmart each other over multiple rounds or games. There’s always a social level, which can be as simple as bringing people together to play or as nuanced as the communication and negotiation skills you need to excel Catan. But Life in Reterraa new board game designed by Eric M. Lang and Ken Gruhl with art by Hugo Cuellarhas a level that many other games don’t have – a creative level. This makes it one of the most interesting new titles of the year.
Life in Reterra posits a distant future in which urban centers have been reclaimed by nature and in which ideas about humanity’s past exist only as artifacts. It is up to the players to rebuild these cities as they see fit. The art style reflects this conceit well, with colorful tiles filled with various biomes and the occasional relic like a smartphone. Players earn points for dividing these biomes into contiguous sections and filling the table in front of them with green spaces, deserts, and cheerful lakes or streams.
But the land itself is only the first level of the game. When placing these tiles, players must constantly pay attention to their orientation in order to create the largest and most valuable biomes possible, but also to create the foundations necessary to place specially shaped buildings on them. And it is in the placement of these buildings that the game shows its true potential.
The buildings in Life in Reterra are divided into three different groups, each more complex than the other. In the game’s “starter set,” gardens are worth additional points, but only if you have the largest continuous piece of terrain on the table. For each type of relic you have on the board, schools get extra points and so on. There are three sets in total, presenting a total of 30 different buildings in the box.
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Beyond the starter set is the manual for Life in Reterra only contains four other “curated building sets”. The Unfriendly Neighbors set is confrontational, as players use buildings in ways that have dramatic effects on the other players at the table. The Peace & Quiet set features very, very little interaction between players. Meanwhile, the Popularity Contest Set lies somewhere in between. In this way, the mechanical level of the game can be exchanged at will. Once you get deep enough into the manual, Life in Reterra becomes something like a platform, a system that can offer different games for different target groups at different times.
And then, on the 14th page of the manual, Life in Reterra does something remarkable: it asks players to assemble their own sets of buildings to play. “My Building Sets” reads the spread, revealing a blank worksheet with space for four new game options that players can create all on their own.
With this final creative layer Life in Reterra invites players to become designers themselves. The manual, as expertly written as it is, fades into the background and becomes merely a reference point. The rules are intended to make the game easier and not to dictate what the game should look like. Ultimately, it’s up to the individual to have their own fun and rebuild the game to suit their needs while also rebuilding the land itself. This is a bold move – especially for a game aimed at the mass market.
While Lang, Gruhl and publisher Hasbro have brought their layered, open design to Target’s toy shelves, they’ve also decided to bring some of board games’ premium fit and finish to the boutique as well. Life in Reterra is not just a cheap box with cardboard parts and plastic movers. The cards are bold and have a beautiful linen finish, the wooden meeples are screen printed, the elegant instructions are saddle stitched, and all components are stored in modular plastic trays with transparent lids. When you open it up, this game looks and feels like something you’d get in the mail after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
When I interviewed Lang earlier this year, he called Life in Reterra a “lifestyle game”. At the time, I thought of it as a game that would engage newcomers to the larger board game hobby and encourage them to make board games a part of their lives. But the opposite is true. Life in Reterra is an incredibly solid and resilient design that can be shuffled and reshuffled like a trading card game to create different experiences. It’s also a game that respects the player’s time and a physical product built to last. For this reason alone, it has found a permanent place in our home – not in the closet or on a shelf, but in the middle of the coffee table.
Now, mixed in with all the other urgent detritus of our modern lives – remote controls and smartphones, chewed pencils, junk mail and half-finished homework – is our family’s new favorite board game. Life in Reterra has become something we return to every week, and even when we’re not playing, sometimes we’re just dreaming about the kits we might dream up for next time.
Life in Reterra hasn’t changed our family’s lifestyle, but it has managed to creep into it. I think it could easily find a place in your home too.
