Gaia Project
lastmod 2024-07-16created 2024-07-161 edits
A board game for 1–4 players released in 2017 by Helge Ostertag and Jens Drögemüller. It is the sequel to Terra Mystica, released in 2012, and both designers are the same as Terra Mystica's. If Terra Mystica is about several factions grabbing land within a small patch of a single planet, Gaia Project can be described as a game of space land-grabbing in which 14 factions, each from a different type of planet, compete over many planets. As a sequel, its system is basically almost identical to Terra Mystica's, but several important systems have been added, so after a few plays it may feel like a completely different game from Terra Mystica. Because the basic mechanics are similar, once you have played one of the two games you can quickly learn and adapt to the other.
Each faction has a fixed type of planet it can inhabit. For example, the Terrans, the human faction from Earth, can live only on Terra planets. To move to a planet with a different environment, you have to make it habitable for yourself through terraforming. There are also Gaia planets, a kind of neutral utopian planet, which every faction can inhabit.
As an aside, many people learn Gaia Project after Terra Mystica, and since the systems are almost the same, there are very many cases of people using Terra Mystica terms while talking about Gaia Project. Like calling ore "workers"...
It supports solo play, but you don't roam the vast universe alone; instead, an Automa is set up as the opposing faction and the two factions compete. So it is basically a 2-player game. The Automa takes random actions according to separate rules, and the game difficulty can be changed in levels. However, changing the level is not much different from simply raising its final raw score, so it doesn't mean much.
There is an official version on Steam, which supports not only online matchmaking but also games against AI and special scenarios for each faction.