Life in Reterra is the highly replayable board game that now lives rent-free in my family room

polygon.com:

A good board game has a lot of layers to it. Narrative layers surround and define a board game’s storyline, while mechanical layers govern the moment-to-moment action. More complex games have a rich strategic layer, with players trying to outfox each other over multiple turns or games. There’s always a social layer as well, which can be as simple as gathering people together to play, or as nuanced as the communication and negotiation skills required to excel at Catan. But Life in Reterra, a new board game designed by Eric M. Lang and Ken Gruhl with art by Hugo Cuellar, has a layer that many other games don’t — a creative layer. That makes it one of the year’s most interesting new titles.

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Life in Reterra posits a far future where urban centers have been taken back 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 that conceit well, with brightly colored tiles filled with different biomes as well as the occasional relic, like a smartphone. Players score points for organizing these biomes into contiguous sections, filling the table in front of them with green spaces, deserts, and cheerful lakes or streams.

But the land itself is only the game’s first layer. As players place those tiles, they must constantly consider their orientation in order to create the largest and most valuable biomes that they can, but also to create the foundations needed to place specially shaped buildings on top. And it’s in the placement of these buildings that the game