I had a bit of a disappointing first solo play of Planta Nubo last night. From setup, learning, playing 4 rounds and tear down it took me 4 hours. I think Contract Fulfillment is a mechanic that is just not meant for me.
Unlike Revive which is an ambitious multi-faceted future vision of humanity after the apocalypse, Planta Nubo just didn’t manage to tie its parts together as well as Revive–or at least that is what my first game felt like.
And the aspect I was most interested in the tile laying puzzle seemed a smallish aspect of the game.
I want to give it another go with multiplayer because the BotBot rules seemed a little fuzzy at times even though they shouldn’t be and I worried far too much about grokking the rules. It may be that this is a game that evolves over multiple plays.
The central aspect is that you put tiles in your airy tree garden. Those tiles come with flowers on them which you want to deliver to the waiting zeppelins or your own board for green energy points with which you then power your tree and get to move your energy die around it to collect action activation tokens for your custom card actions and O^2 (aka VP). After each of the four rounds if you have planted and subsequently cleared a large enough area of your board you can plant a forest on top of the flower beds to gain even more points.
To the right of the big central board you can see the action selection thingy. In each round everyone gets 3 turns to place their tools between those actions and activate 1 adjacent one (the overtime token allows you to activate 2 actions once per round). There are some placement rules for your tools. And the leftover one gets placed for an additional bonus on the main board before forest planting at the end of the round.
One of the things it has is bonus chaining and extra actions etc. so a turn can be quite complex and take a while so while that is interesting it will also make multiplayer harder because you need to wait for others to resolve their long turns and if you messed up your own turns are short and you sit their watching the rest most of the time. I can already see my partner’s frustration. This is a mechanic I enjoy in other games though (Arnak, Revive…)