It can be difficult to review a game like Gaia Project. At this point, everyone who likes the game has already played it or already knows they like it. It feels like everyone who hasn’t played it yet has a reason. Either it’s too intimidating, or they bounced off the pedigree that Gaia Project was born from, namely Terra Mystica or Age of Innovation. It’s one of those games that has built such a reputation for itself that most people have already decided where they stand before the box even hits the table. And the people who love it, LOVE IT.

Gaia Project is a one-to-four-player resource management Euro game where players take on one of fourteen asymmetric factions and attempt to utilize their limited resources to expand their influence across the galaxy and earn the most victory points. There’s a lot to do in Gaia Project, and the game is played over six rounds. Every round, players take one action on their turn, with turns continuing around the table until each player eventually passes. Once you pass, you’re done for the round, but everyone else gets to keep going until they’ve exhausted what they can do.

One of my favourite mechanisms in the game is actually its player interaction through the power system. On your player board, each faction has these little power bowls with power tokens slowly cycling between them, Mancala style. Whenever someone builds or improves a building near one of yours, you get the opportunity to charge power. If all you have nearby is a humble little mine, you’ll get a single power charge for free. But as your buildings become more advanced, you’ll often have the option to charge two or even three power instead. The catch is that charging the extra power costs you one or two victory points.

At first that sounds completely backwards. Why would you willingly throw away points? The answer is that power lets you perform additional actions or convert it into resources that will often earn you more points than you sacrificed in the first place. It’s one of those wonderfully Euro-style decisions where you’re constantly evaluating whether a short-term loss creates a larger long-term gain.

The game starts with everyone choosing a faction. I’ve read online discussions where people argue this is where games are won and lost. Some groups will study the map before the game even starts and actually bid victory points just for the privilege of choosing factions first because they believe they can exploit that particular galaxy layout better than everyone else. Our group is nowhere near that level of meta. We simply deal two faction boards to each player and let everyone choose between those options, which honestly is more than enough decision-making for us.

Every faction has its own home planet type. One of the primary actions throughout the game is building mines, but before you can build anything, you first have to reach a planet. At the beginning of the game your ships can only reach adjacent spaces, but one of the technology tracks gradually extends that range to two, three, or even four spaces away, letting you leap across the galaxy, but I’ll touch on technology tracks in a little bit.

Of course, simply reaching a planet isn’t enough. Unless it’s your faction’s native planet type, you’ll also have to terraform it. There are seven planet types in the game, and every faction naturally lives on only one of them. Every other planet requires varying amounts of terraforming before it becomes habitable. That’s another important consideration when choosing your faction. If your faction is only one terraforming step away from the same planet types as two other factions, all three of you are going to spend the game fighting over those worlds.

So to build a mine you need to reach a planet, terraform it if necessary, and then simply pay one ore and two credits to place your mine. Once a building goes onto the board, it never leaves your control. That permanence is important because players can absolutely box one another into corners, limiting future expansion and cutting off access to sections of the galaxy. Since every building you place also uncovers additional income on your player board, every placement feels significant. Early on, each mine you put down increases your ore income, slowly growing your engine one building at a time.

Another major action is upgrading your buildings. Buildings follow a strict technology tree. Mines upgrade into trading stations, trading stations can become either planetary institutes or academies, and academies can eventually receive one final upgrade. Whenever you upgrade, the old building returns to your player board and the new building replaces it on the map. Earlier I mentioned that buildings never leave the board, and that’s still true. You’re simply replacing your own structure with a better one, retaining control of the planet you initially placed it on.

The interesting part is what happens on your player board. Returning a mine means covering up the income that mine was providing. Sure, your new trading station will earn you credits each income phase, but you’ve also just reduced your ore production by reclaiming that mine. You’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul.

It’s also worth mentioning that upgrading a mine into a trading station costs either three credits or six credits. The cheaper cost only applies if the upgraded building will charge another player’s power, rewarding players for building near one another (and punishing those who choose to build in their own little corner of the map). Otherwise, you’re paying the full six credits. Trading stations produce more income over time, but they’re still expensive enough that timing really matters. Upgrade too early and you suddenly find yourself with fewer mines on the board and not enough ore to continue expanding. Upgrade too aggressively toward the higher-tier buildings and you may have these incredible abilities while simultaneously wondering why you’re broke all the time.

Another action is forming federations. Whenever you can connect buildings with a combined power value of seven or more, you may create a federation. If there are empty spaces between your buildings, you can bridge those gaps with satellites. Completing a federation earns you a federation token, which is usually worth a healthy chunk of points along with some useful resource bonus. More importantly, federation tokens become incredibly important later in the game.

Then there are the technology tracks. By spending four knowledge, you can advance one step on any of the game’s six technology tracks. These tracks affect all sorts of things: reducing terraforming costs, increasing your shipping range, providing Q.I.C. cubes that let you travel or terraform special planets, or unlocking Gaiaformers that let you colonize the strange purple Gaia planets that eventually become habitable. Every track pushes your engine in a different direction.

Getting to the top of a track isn’t easy. You need a federation token before you can move from the fifth to the sixth space, and when you do, you actually flip that federation token over as payment. On top of that, only one player may occupy the top, most powerful space of each technology track, so getting there first can be a huge advantage.

You can also advance these tracks by acquiring technology tiles. Building an academy lets you claim one, and these tiles vary wildly. Some provide additional income every round, some grant one-time resource boosts, and others offer entirely new bonus actions you can perform each round. Whenever you claim a standard technology tile from a row, you also advance one step on that corresponding technology track.

Near the top of the technology board are advanced technology tiles. If you’re already sitting on the fifth or sixth step of a technology track, you may claim one of these instead. They’re much stronger, but they come with two costs. First, you need to flip another federation token. Second, you have to cover one of your existing technology tiles. Sometimes that’s easy if you’re covering a one-time resource bonus you’ve already used. Other times you’re giving up an income bonus you’ve relied on all game. Every decision seems to create another decision.

There are plenty of other actions available as well, but I think by this point you probably get the idea. Gaia Project is a huge, complex board game built on interlocking systems. It’s a game about efficiency and squeezing just enough resources together to perform one more action before the round ends. A critical mistake early in the game might mean that next round you only get two or three actions before having to pass because you’ve completely starved yourself of resources. It is absolutely brutal by design.

The flipside is that when you finally unlock the puzzle, it must feel incredible. You spend six resources here, gain four resources back there, use those four resources to perform two additional actions, move up multiple technology tracks, expand across the galaxy, and somehow everything falls into place. I think that feeling is exactly why Gaia Project is so beloved. It’s the kind of game that rewards careful planning and deliberate sequencing. There isn’t random luck waiting to ruin your strategy. The only thing standing between you and victory is how well you’ve thought through your decisions.

That being said, this is absolutely not multiplayer solitaire. You cannot simply stare at your own player board and expect to do well. So many things in Gaia Project are finite, especially the real estate. Players are constantly trying to snake planets away from each other one turn earlier than expected. The shared power actions and Q.I.C. actions can only be claimed once per round, so being first and grabbing the action everyone else desperately wanted can completely swing an entire round. It’s an incredibly crunchy, cerebral experience.

So why don’t I like it?

I think my biggest problem is that I’m just not very good at Gaia Project. I am the player who reaches round two or three and suddenly realizes I only get two or three actions because I mismanaged my resources somewhere half an hour earlier. Then I spend half the game trying to recover enough income just to function again. Nearly every time I’ve played Gaia Project, I’ve come in dead last. I’m scoring around one hundred points while everyone else is sitting comfortably between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and ninety. It doesn’t feel particularly good. I constantly feel hamstrung because I’m missing one credit, or I don’t quite have enough knowledge to reach the next technology level that would unlock the thing I actually wanted to do.

So my main problem with Gaia Project is really just a skill issue.

The game also takes about four hours, so it’s not exactly something I’m eager to pull off the shelf on a Wednesday night when everyone has work the next morning. I’ve made similar criticisms of Terra Mystica and Age of Innovation. They’re all descendants of the same system. They share a lot of DNA, even though people who have played them extensively will rightfully tell you they’re all very different games and that those differences matter tremendously. I don’t doubt them. They’re just all built around a style of resource optimization that I consistently struggle with.

The question I’ve been asking myself after my most recent play is this: how many times am I willing to play a game I don’t particularly enjoy because someone else at the table absolutely loves it? I think the important context to answer that question is frequency. We probably play Gaia Project once a year, at best. Once a year I’m perfectly happy to sit down, play a game I know I’m not good at, and get absolutely curb-stomped because my friends genuinely enjoy pulling the levers and dancing with the system. I can absolutely see where people derive joy from Gaia Project. I really can. I’m just not one of those people. Maybe we’d play faster if we played it more often. Maybe I’d remember to build a resource engine first before rushing the top tier buildings if we played it twice in a row. But we’ll never know.

For me, Gaia Project ends up being a frustrating experience because I constantly feel handcuffed by my lack of resources. I’m constantly one credit short of a Happy Meal. There are literally hundreds of games I’d rather play. At the same time, I can’t ignore the incredible design achievement sitting in front of me. Balancing fourteen asymmetric factions while creating this kind of strategic depth and ridiculously high skill ceiling is remarkable.

It’s honestly amazing looking at the highest-rated players on Board Game Arena and seeing people with over sixteen hundred games played maintaining something like a ninety-one percent win rate. Then I watch expert playthroughs where players casually break two hundred points and it feels almost unreal. Watching them play is kind of like watching Bruce Lee smash concrete with his bare hands. Then I stand up, turn around, and immediately stub my toe on a brick wall.

I am not Bruce Lee. I will never be Bruce Lee.

But for all the Bruce Lees of the board gaming community, I’m genuinely glad Gaia Project exists.

It’s just not my cup of tea.