Reviews Gaming News Tabletop Gaming Tabletop Gaming Reviews

Those Pesky Humans!: Conquest of Planet Earth Reviewed

Elliott Miller

May 17, 2011

Game Name: Conquest of Planet Earth – The Space Alien Game

Publisher: Flying Frog Productions

Designer: Jason Hill

Artist: Jack Scott Hill

Year: 2011

Players: One to four players

Ages: 12+

Playing Time: 60 Minutes

Retail Price: $49.95

Sometimes I play a game for a challenging, strategic experience, and sometimes I play just for fun. Conquest of Planet Earth falls into the latter category. The game has a strong, 50’s sci-fi ‘B’ movie theme to it that shines through this lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek game of alien invasion.

In this game, the players are the aliens, and the object is, you guessed it, the Conquest of Plant Earth.

Let me just first say that this is my first Flying Frog game that I have played, and thus my first exposure to the company. The components of this game are top notch. The miniatures are very cool, the boards are glossy and colorful, and the cards are thick and laminated and shiny (oooh, shiny), as are the markers and tokens. In fact, my son actually spilled some soda on the board, but we wiped everything down quickly and nothing was damaged, including the cards. I’m pretty impressed with the components and artwork by Jack Scott Hill in this game. The rules are not complex, and are fairly well done. There are separate turn summary cards for each player too.

There are several ways to play the game, competitive and co-operative. The team and solo play modes are different versions of the co-op and compete games. The co-op game has its own set of rules and special cards/technologies to use to make the humans formidable foes. The goal is to conquer the planet before the humans can invent the Super Cannon and blow them from the sky. This version is a lot of fun in its own right, but the most enjoyment for me came from the default mode, the competitive game.

Each player randomly chooses one of the 10 different alien races to play, and selects a set of color tokens and ships as well. Your alien race has intelligence and strength scores, and special abilities that can be activated by spending Alien Menace tokens you can get during the game. Intelligence represents the number of cards you are allowed to keep in your hand, so that one player might only get to keep 3 cards, while another might get 5. The cards do some good stuff, so a high intelligence is a big plus. Strength represents the power of each of your spaceships. If your strength is 4, one of your ships has 4 strength, 2 have 8 strength, and so on. The more ships you attack with, the better your chance of winning a battle.

There are 5 identical game boards, each with 9 spaces on them used to determine the different locations that must be conquered. The center space represents the alien landing sites, or the center of Earth’s resistance on the center board. Each player gets a board and attaches them to the center board in a configuration that depends upon the number of players. The center spot of your board is where you place all of your alien landing craft, of which each player has 4.

The object is to be the first player to reach 8 terror points, represented by the population number on each location card. Once someone reaches 8 points, the game is immediately over, so it may be crucial to go first on your turn if you want to snatch victory from your competitors.

In order to determine the first player on each turn, players select one of six tokens available to them that have numbers from 2-6, plus a D6 token if you would rather roll for your number. All players reveal their tokens at once. The player who chose the lowest number is the first player for that turn, but the caveat is that you only receive that number of action points to use on your turn. Once you use a number, you cant use it again until you use all the others, so you need to plan carefully. The other players will proceed clockwise from the first player.

In a nutshell, a turn consists of spending your action points to repair (destroyed ships can come back for a cost of 1 action point each), move your ships, or purchase alien menace tokens. Next, you will explore any empty location space you moved to by drawing a card from the location deck. Any location you land on that is not conquered, you must battle against the human resistance. If you win, you place a conquest token there and gain terror points equal to the number of population on the location card. Finally you draw back up to your maximum amount of event cards.

The location cards are randomly drawn and each card has a resistance value and a population value. For each point of resistance, the aliens must win a separate fight against a draw from the resistance deck. A mountain range would have 0 pop and 0 resistance, and is basically a wasted move, while a city could have 3 of each, forcing you to fight 3 times in order to get add their population to your terror total.

The resistance deck is interesting. In most cases, you will get a card that tells you the type of resistance, and a basic strength number. For example, Local Police have a strength of 2. Sometimes though, you will draw a hero card, which gives a strength bonus. After you draw a hero card, you keep drawing resistance cards until you get a basic resistance card. Add the hero bonuses to the strength of the resistance card to get the humans strength value. Multiple hero draws are cumulative, so it is possible to end up facing impossible odds depending on the luck of the draw. Fear not, you also roll attack dice for yourself and the humans, and add these numbers to the strength. Anyone who rolls a 6 gets an automatic win (even the humans). After you defeat that resistance, you have to defeat more of them depending on the resistance value on the location card. If you lose, one of your ships is destroyed, and you can either continue the fight or retreat to a save space next to you (if there is one).

The event cards allow you to do many fun things. Many involve causing problems for your alien competitors, or give you bonuses, or allow you to draw a card from the Space Stuff deck. The space stuff deck has many goodies, including free terror points, or gaining a powerful ally to join your race. There are 4 grey ally figures you can use just like one of your ships, and gives a big advantage to the players that get them.

One interesting note, during a game my son decided to keep all of his aliens together and move from space to space, wiping out the resistance with their huge strength advantage. I thought he had figured out a way to break the game and win with overwhelming odds, however my daughter dropped a bomb on his location, wiping out all of his ships and destroying the location completely, which took away the terror points he had earned for his conquest. He quickly changed his strategy.

It is a cutthroat game, you have to stop the other aliens while working your way to victory. Those who don’t like the screw-your-neighbor type game can actually still have a great time with this game by playing the co-op version. Pretty cool.

The game is the right length, from 45 minutes to an hour. It is light, it is fun, and it’s mighty random.

[rwp-review id=”0″]