Life in Reterra is the highly replayable board game that now sits rent-free in my family room

A good board game has many layers. Narrative layers surround and define the storyline of a board game, while mechanical layers define the moment-to-moment action. More complex games have a rich strategic layer, where players try to outsmart each other over multiple turns or games. There’s always a social layer too, which can be as simple as bringing people together to play, or as nuanced as the communication and negotiation skills needed to excel. Katan. But Life in Reterraa new board game designed by Eric M. Lang and Ken Gruhl with art by Hugo Cuellar, has a layer that many other games don’t have: a creative layer. That makes it one of the most interesting new titles of the year.

Life in Reterra posits a distant future where urban centers have been reclaimed by nature and where notions of humanity’s past exist only as artifacts. It is up to the players to rebuild these cities as they see fit. The art style reflects that conceit well, with brightly colored tiles filled with different biomes and the occasional relic, like a smartphone. Players score points by organizing these biomes into contiguous sections, filling the table in front of them with green spaces, deserts, and cheerful lakes or streams.

But the land itself is only the first layer of the game. As players place these tiles, they must continually consider their orientation to create the largest and most valuable biomes they can, as well as the foundation needed to place specially shaped buildings on top of them. And it is through the placement of these buildings that the game begins to show its true potential.

The buildings inside Life in Reterra are organized into three different sets, each more complex than the last. In the ‘starter set’ of the game, gardens are worth extra points, but only if you have the largest contiguous site on the table. Schools are worth extra points for each different type of relic you have on the board, and so on. There are three sets in total, with a total of 30 different buildings in the box.

In addition to the starter set, the manual for Life in Reterra contains only four ‘composite building sets’. The UnFriendly Neighbors set is confrontational, with players using buildings in ways that have a dramatic impact on the other players at the table. The Peace & Quiet set has very little interaction between players. Meanwhile, the popularity contest set is somewhere in between. In this way, the mechanical layer of the game can be changed at will. Once you have delved deep enough into the manual, Life in Reterra it becomes a kind of platform, a system capable of playing different games at different times for different audiences.

And then, on the 14th page of the manual, Life in Reterra does something remarkable: it asks players to put together their own sets of buildings to play with. “My Building Sets” reads the two pages, revealing a blank worksheet with room for four new ways to play that players can create from scratch.

With this final creative layer, Life in Reterra invites players to become designers themselves. The manual, no matter how expertly written, fades into the background and becomes only a point of reference. The rules are there to facilitate the game, not to dictate what the nature of that game should be. Ultimately, it’s up to the individuals to make their own fun and rebuild the game to suit their needs, just as they rebuild the country itself. It’s a bold move, especially for a game that targets mass-market retailers.

At the same time that Lang, Gruhl and publisher Hasbro have brought their multi-layered, open design to the toy aisles at Target, they’ve also opted to bring some of the high-end board gaming boutique fits and finishes as well. Life in Reterra is not just a cheap box with cardboard pieces and plastic movers. The cards are sturdy and have a beautiful linen finish, the wooden meeples are screen printed, the elegant manual saddle stitch and all components are stored in modular plastic trays with transparent lids. When you open it up, this game looks and feels like something you’d receive in the mail after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

When I interviewed Lang earlier this year, he called Life in Reterra a ‘lifestyle game’. At the time, I thought this meant a game that would welcome newcomers to the larger board game hobby and encourage them to make board games a part of their lives. But something more like the opposite is true. Life in Reterra is an incredibly solid and resilient design, which like a collectible card game can be mixed and remixed into multiple different experiences. It’s also a game that respects the player’s time, and a physical product built to last. For that reason alone, it has found a permanent place in our house — not in the cupboard or on a shelf, but in the middle of the coffee table.

Now, mixed in with all the other pressing detritus of our modern lives – remote controls and smartphones, chewed-up pencils, junk mail and half-finished homework – is our family’s new favorite board game. Life in Reterra has become something we return to weekly, and even when we’re not playing, sometimes we just daydream about the building sets we could come up with for the next go-around.

Life in Reterra has not changed our family’s lifestyle, but has managed to settle into it. I think he can easily find a place in your home too.