Review: Life in Reterra has a creative layer that other board games lack

A good board game has a lot of layers. Narrative layers surround and define the board game’s story, while mechanical layers control moment-to-moment events. More complex games have a rich strategic layer, as players try to outdo each other in multiple turns or games. There is always a social layer as well, which can be as simple as getting people together to play, or as complex as the communication and negotiation skills required to excel at Catan. but Life in Riteraa new board game designed with art by Eric M. Lange and Ken Grohl Hugo Cuellar, has a layer that many other games don’t — a creativity layer. This makes it one of the most interesting new titles of the year.

Life in Ritera It posits a distant future in which urban centers have been reclaimed by nature, and where notions of humanity’s past exist only as artifacts. It’s up to players to rebuild those cities as they see fit. The art style reflects this conceit well, with brightly colored tiles filled with different biomes as well as occasional relics, such as a smartphone. Players score points for organizing these biomes into adjacent sections, filling the table in front of them with greenery, deserts, lakes or cheerful streams.

But the land itself is only the first layer of the game. When players place these tiles, they must constantly think about their direction in order to create the largest and most valuable biomes, but also to create the foundations needed to place specially shaped buildings on top. It is in the placement of these buildings that the game begins to show its true potential.

Buildings in Life in Ritera It is organized into three different collections, each more complex than the last. In the game’s “starting set”, parks are worth extra points, but only if you have the largest piece of contiguous terrain on the table. Schools are worth extra points for each different type of monument on the board, and so on. There are three sets in total, offering a total of 30 different buildings within the box.

Beyond the starter set, a guide to Life in Ritera Includes only four other “coordinated building sets”. The Unfriends Neighbors set is confrontational, with players using buildings in ways that greatly impact other players at the table. The Peace and Quiet group features very little interaction between players. Meanwhile, the popularity contest group falls somewhere in between. This way, the game’s mechanical layer can be switched at will. Once you make it deep enough in the guide, Life in Ritera It becomes a platform, a system capable of being different games for different audiences at different times.

And then, on page 14 of the guide, Life in Ritera It does something cool: it asks players to organize their own sets of buildings to play with. My Building Sets reads the two-page spread, revealing a blank worksheet with space for four new ways to play, all of which players can create themselves.

With this final creative layer, Life in Ritera Invites players to become designers themselves. The guide, expertly written as it is, fades into the background to become merely a point of reference. Rules are there to facilitate play, not to dictate the nature of that play. Ultimately, it’s up to individuals to have fun themselves, rebuilding the game to meet their needs even while rebuilding the Earth itself. It’s a bold move – especially for a game aimed at mass-market retailers.

At the same time that Lang, Gruhl, and publisher Hasbro brought their layered, open-ended design to the toy aisles at Target, they also chose to bring some distinctive designs and finishes to high-end board games as well. Life in Ritera Not just a cheap box of cardboard parts and plastic motors. The cards are huge with a beautiful linen finish, the wood posts are screen printed, elegant hand saddle stitching is present, and all components are stored inside modular plastic trays with clear lids. When you open it up, this game looks like something you’d receive in the mail after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

When I interviewed Lange earlier this year, he called me Life in Ritera “Lifestyle game”. At the time, I took that to mean a game that welcomed newbies to the larger board gaming hobby and encouraged them to make board games a part of their lives. But something like the opposite is true. Life in Ritera It is an incredibly powerful and flexible design, which can be mixed and remixed into multiple different experiences, like a collectible card game. It’s also a game that respects the player’s time, and a physical product that’s built to last. For this reason alone, it has found a permanent place in our house – not in a closet or on a shelf, but right in the middle of the coffee table.

Now, mixed with all the other urgent detritus of our modern lives—remote controls, smartphones, chewed pencils, junk mail, unfinished homework—it’s our family’s new favorite board game. Life in Ritera It’s become something we come back to weekly, and even when we’re not playing, sometimes we just dream about the building blocks we might come up with in the next round.

Life in Ritera He didn’t change our family’s lifestyle, but he managed to work his way into it. I think it could easily find a place in your home as well.