Last Wednesday we played a 4-player game of Evacuation by Vladimir Suchy - we all were new to the game but all came prepared having watched a how-to play video.

The game is a race to evacuate your people and economy from earth, which has become uninhabitable, to a new planet. During the game you will have to dismantle you local economy on earth, transport people and infrastructure and build up on the new planet. You will have 4 years to do so and each year is divided into 7 different phases. The action phase is by far the most time consuming as you will use the resources generated to buy ships, build building, settle people and conduct research. To perform actions, you will need to invest your generated energy and as the game progresses and you dismantle your economy on earth you will need to carefully plan to have enough production already on the new home for the next year. Its a balancing act and rather challenging. Each action has a specific value and in the next phase you add all the values together to advance on the progress track which unlocks moving certain aspects of you economy and settling new biomes on the planet.

While the game only has 4 turns, the phases are long enough and filled with decisions that it does not feel like you need to min/max too much. This is something I never liked about Arnak which is also from CGE. While overall I thought it was an interesting game it feels a bit over-complicated. I would not mind to play again but would not buy it myself to add to the collection. Towards the end of the game everyone is basically performing the same actions (or at least the 4 of us were). Might be possible to play a different strategy but in such a complicated game it can be hard to come up with the alternative strats. The final advancing on the progress track in year 4 feels more or less pointless.

Furthermore, we also played 2-player Castles of Burgundy which we actually tied in score :D and a game of Ark Nova which was a bit of a slaughter. However, we finally found a good way which avoids shuffling the cards of Ark Nova and makes playing a bit more fun.