Award-winning board game designer Eric Lang, whose Viking-themed Blood Rage is a fixture on Polygon’s list of the best modern board games, has something new to share — a tile-laying strategy game called Life in Reterra. This time, instead of partnering with hot young publishers like CMON or Steamforged Games, he and co-designer Ken Gruhl (Happy Salmon) have gone with the granddaddy of them all, 100-year-old Hasbro. And while we don’t know everything yet about how the game works yet, we do know Lang himself considers it among his “strongest designs ever,” and that’s enough right there to get me interested.
A news release from Hasbro describes Life in Reterra as a cozy take on the post-apocalypse where humanity soldiers on after the end of civilization. The art supports that, with charming little cows and grainy wooden meeples. It’s a Euro-style game, meaning that it likely avoids putting players into direct conflict and de-emphasizes the random nature of dice rolls.
It clearly takes its cues from modern classics like Carcassonne and Kingdomino, which both ask players to build things out of shared piles of communal tiles. It’s a genre of board gaming that’s stood the test of time, mainly because they’re quick to learn and hard to master — just the thing to hook new players. In a post on Facebook, Lang seems to agree. He calls the $29.99 title a “lifestyle gateway” — that’s marketing speak for a game that can introduce casual consumers to more complex experiences. But he also touts its replayability, claiming “thousands of setups [that] all feel different.”
“We’ve been working on this game for years,” Lang said in the Facebook note. “ I consider this among my strongest designs ever.”
We’ll know more once the early copies begin to make their way out to eager reviewers. You can find Life in Reterra available for pre-order starting today online at Target.
