That woman at the back of the room that you haven’t been able to take your eyes off of. The gorgeous and mysterious honey whose lit a fire in your guts and has you questioning everything you once thought was true. She’s not only a total knockout but she’s unequivocally brilliant, focused, and intellectually challenging. She’s perfection personified through overwrought genius. She’s Earth Reborn.
In 2010 <PERSON> bestowed a gift of epic proportions. This large box of finely sculpted plastic and multi-layered mounds of cardboard is not dripping in theme – it’s overflowing in bucket loads. This is a deep, overly thematic post-apocalyptic miniature game with enough sub-systems and multi-faceted rules to satisfy the most gluttonous of masochists. You can search rooms, torture prisoners, launch missiles from a silo, and put your buzz-saw fist through a mech’s face.
Learning this game is a bear. It sets out to teach the rules through scenarios dedicated to each rules section so that participants may slowly build up their acumen and internalize the sub-systems. It’s a good way to teach but it’s not practical for most in the hobby. Earth Reborn requires dedication and work which will ultimately pay dividends like a broken slot machine, but you must put in the effort. It starts off explaining the core Order System, where you play a tile next to one of your characters and then spend some of your limited Command Points (CP) to take one of several actions on the tile. The Command tiles themselves are quite varied, and allow you to spend different amounts of CP to perform actions more effectively and increase the likelihood of success.
Movement and shooting comes next and are pretty simple to grasp as everything is measured orthogonally and core concepts like line of sight are reminiscent of similar affairs many gamers would have experienced prior. Attack rolls are handled through custom dice that generate various amounts of hits that are needed to overcome the opponents own hits and armor in melee, or just their armor when firing a weapon at range. 504
It’s not altogether complicated but there is depth here, particularly once you start including equipment and weapons which modify rolls and perform differently. You also have added interaction from firing arcs and different amounts of damage depending on where the target is in relation to which way your character is facing. Some people would argue this is needlessly fiddly; I would argue it is simply awesome. When you look at <PERSON> melee arc, and realize he is just as effective on his left side as his front (due to having a huge buzz-saw left hand) you realize the amount of cleverness in the design is inordinately high.
The game is simply made of an extraordinarily large portion of these small touches of ingenuity as the attention to detail is phenomenal. The Search mechanic is a prominent example, as many games simply have you roll some dice and draw a card to claim your reward. <PERSON> says “hell no”, as Earth Reborn requires you to manipulate the Search deck with a sub-system that can only be described as brilliant. You roll dice which give you search points and allow you special actions such as shuffling the deck or flipping it over. You’re allowed to spend your search points to purchase the card on top as long as the icons on the card match the room you are searching – which means you can only pick up an Assault Rifle if you’re searching the armory or the Declaration of Independence if you’re searching a Command icon room. You can only buy the top card, so you must manipulate the deck to view additional cards and find an item to either accomplish your objective or aid in your ability to vanquish the enemy. Adding to the utterly high degree of awesomeness is the fact that the cards are double-sided and sometimes you’ll need to finagle the deck to flip cards over to find that needed piece of equipment. It’s just sheer joy and you’ll find yourself going out of your way to perform a Search simply to interact with this incredible mechanic. I’d almost go so far as to say it’s my favorite mechanic of any game I’ve ever played as it’s simply that damn good.
Right behind Searching is the mind-blowing icon driven action system peppered throughout the game. The mechanic is dubbed the “Iconographic Phrasing System” (IPS) and typically consists of a single line of symbols that denote an action or effect you can trigger at the location. Fans of Race for the Galaxy will have no problem quickly digesting this common sense notation which is often highly logical and easily organized. This may, however, be a turn-off of significant proportions for some and is one of the contributing factors of the design’s difficulty in attracting a large popular audience. 366