Evacuation

Look …. I’ve never played a Vladimir Suchy game twice. If I’m paying attention not even once.

He just doesn’t design games I like. (I really hated Woodcraft, as evinced by calling it “A Crime Against Elegance“. I avoided Underwater Cities for a while on general principles, then realized it was Suchy. At that point I attained enlightenment.

If I had remembered that Suchy designed Woodcraft, I would have vetoed this. But I did not.

So I will go on record as saying that Evacuation was mediocre to OK.

It again had way too many systems, including different upgrade powers per player (in random-ish setup!) but the economy was at least of some interest. The core idea of two economies¹ and having to spend local resources to migrate your factories between them was clever. There isn’t really a point salad … at the end of the game your score is the lowest type of production on the new planet. So while there is unity of scoring, the game itself feels like an action salad with a “well, let’s throw in a kitchen sink’s worth of mechanisms.” And we didn’t even play with the advanced action cards.²

I accidentally destroyed my energy production; the gaming equivalent of self-cutting as a cry for help. At least it made me feel something, and frankly it improved my mood knowing that it was possible. There is something here, buried under all the everything else.

Still, I’m in no hurry to play it twice …

Rating — Indifferent.

1. One on the doomed planet and one on the new one. ︎
2. It took long enough to learn the rules without adding optional stuff. And the fact that the optional stuff exists in such a convoluted game gives the feel of “Well, there’s probably some combination that people will like.” ︎