Orbis Review
God created the Earth in 7 days… 14 rounds. He started with some yellow bits and some green bits because they got him more worshippers. Later he took some red bits to annoy all the other gods. And ultimately he regretted his lack of blues and had to smash a promising temple into wasteland because of placement rules. And he saw that it was goo- well. It was OK. Enough for 2nd place at least.
Players: 2-4
Time: 45 mins
Designer:Tim Armstrong (II)
Artist:Davide Tosello
Publisher: Space Cowboys
I do appreciate a good Splendor-like and Orbis more than resembles that classic. Interestingly, the central mechanics are arguably so different. But some details are so strikingly similar and the resulting experience so reminiscent that it is impossible to avoid that comparison. Something that will ultimately come to hurt it in the long run.
Orbis presents itself with a scenario that makes Splendor look thematic. You’re building a pyramid shaped world out of hexagonal bits. You’re sort of a God, but not any specific God, at least not until you take one of the God tiles. Which I suppose makes you more of a Slartibartfast-type architect character. Have you seen my fjords by the way? Award winning, they were.
You start out with a grid of 9 tiles in a square market. You’ll buy tiles using some combination of the 5 coloured resources. Resources that you may not have more than 10 of. Splendor fans may well be squinting in recognition but fear not, things are different and not only because Orbis uses deeply unsatisfying cubes to represent its resources. Which are ‘worshippers’ by the way. Worshipping whom? Pffffftt??
The real twist is how taking a tile from the market seeds its surroundings with cubes. Let’s say I take a green tile. Each tile adjacent to that tile gets a green cube placed on it, ready to go into the supply of any player who takes the tile. Jolly clever! Encouraging players to take older tiles and creating healthy player interaction from a single rule. Elegant, you might say. Not only that, each tile has its own special rule, perhaps scoring in certain ways, offering yet more worshippers, or on going discounts (er… yes identically to Splendor, but much much rarer). There’s a bit of strategising in this as you focus more on one colour or another.
This strategizing is driven even harder by the placement rules that sit alongside. You are not just collecting these tiles, but building something. The first few are freely placed in what will become the base of a pyramid. Later tiles must be placed above two others such that the new tile is the same colour as either of the two beneath. Oooh so different! So restrictive! Yes…
Where Splendor was a game of growth, of ever widening options and reaching for ever greater targets, Orbis is a game of restrictions. Of options reducing and constricting until you not only have no room to breath, you forget what freedom feels like. You can only take certain tile colours because of the building rules, then that limited selection of tiles must be paid for with exactly the right set of worshippers and costs only go up as the game goes on. Just as your building choices are restricting your options, the game decides to make your options even more limited through pricing where the only way of getting more resources is by taking the right tiles.
I hope you can see the vicious cycle that exists here. The game doesn’t just reduce your options as it goes on, it grabs you from behind and drags you towards certain roads. There’s some wriggling and struggling but not exactly what I would celebrate as agency.
And then you accept the inevitable and take a wasteland. This release valve allows you to take any tile you like (hint: the one with all the worshippers on it) and flip it to its wasteland side. A wasteland is a land of all colours, opening up your future build options, but costs you a point at game end. Quite the punishment given how low scoring this game can be.
There is some cunning nuance in when to take wastelands. They count as all colours for scoring blue and green tiles, whose point requirements are based on having certain adjacent colours. There is a God tile who will reward you for them too. But it feels wrong, both mechanically (lost points) and thematically (its a dreary rotten wasteland), and so discourages this line of thinking. You aren’t allowed to feel clever for taking them, more ‘maybe this will help me?’ Or worse, ‘I have no choice in this.’
A game that restricts your choices as it goes on is, I feel, a riskier proposition for a design than one that opens up like Splendor does. It can go too far and that, I feel, is what has happened to Orbis. Too much of the later half of the game is: I can take this tile or I can take a wasteland. But it never feels good to take a wasteland and being railroaded into one option is awful. And it happens all too easily.
Even anticipating the need for a good number and mix of cubes throughout the game only works so well as there is no way, aside from memorising the tile distribution, of planning for later tiles. There is a single stack to work through, in contrast to Splendor’s longer term goals. In theory the God tiles, one of which can be taken per player each game, add something longer term to aim for but here too the game falls short. Each is either only really good for one player or, if two players both realise they want one, it’s just a question of whose turn is next. These would have worked better as a set of public objectives all players could score or as private objectives dealt out at the start of the game.
Orbis does lots of unusual things. But none of those things really shine in the greater whole and others seem to directly suffer. The game overall just about limps on with little really there to redeem it. I prefer an arc of increasing opportunity to the opposite presented here, so I suspect Orbis was going to be a tough sell. But it goes further than that and whittles down the choices to the point of leaving none at all and that is something borderline unforgivable.
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