How to Save a World Review – Worker Placement at the End of Days

All I could think about when I first saw How to Save a World was the story of how Ben Affleck was told to shut up on the set of Armageddon after asking whether it would be easier to train astronauts to become miners, rather than miners to become astronauts. It’s a great anecdote, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the new game from designer Yuval Grinspun, beyond the fact that both involve a large asteroid hurtling towards a nearly defenceless planet.

While this is the first game I’ve reviewed from Burnt Island Games, it’s certainly not the first one I’ve played. I’m a big fan of some of their other published games, so I was keen to see whether this one would hit the same mark.

How to play

Time is running out. There are only a handful of rounds before an asteroid causes an extinction event the likes of which we’ve not seen since the dinosaurs. Rest in peace, ya big lizards. You don’t really know exactly when it’s going to happen, but you’re going to do your darndest to save the world before it does. And, ideally, do a better job of it than everyone else at the table.

Now, if you don’t have any experience saving planets, there are only three options: build a giant fricken laser to blow up the asteroid, cover the planet in a forcefield to stop it, or forget about the planet entirely and start building the space equivalent of Noah’s Ark to evacuate its inhabitants.

Building these three projects in How to Save a World plays out like a fairly bog-standard worker placement game. You have three workers, which you take turns placing around the board into different spaces. Each space grants a specific action, and most only allow one worker per round. So, first in, first served.

The first mechanic that will make you stop and go hmmmm is the way the board is split between the planet and its orbiting moon. Only workers stationed on the planet can take planet actions, while those on the moon can only take moon actions. Some actions will also shuttle your worker to the other location at the end of the round.

If your worker ends up stranded in the wrong location, you can purchase a shuttle pass. It only costs a turn and a resource, so it’s not the end of the world. Yet.

The spaces themselves mostly come in four different flavours. They’ll provide resources, let you contribute to one of the three projects, allow you to buy cards, or research upgrades from your personal tech tree. Most of these actions come with a cost, so you’ll need tight control over your resources to do everything you need before the end of the game.

Although, with only three workers, and no option to gain more, you’re going to feel like there’s too much to do with too little time to do it. This is where the cards come in.

There are three different types:

• Blue cards boost actions you’re already taking.
• Yellow cards provide additional actions, usually at a cost.
• Green cards represent the animals you’re trying to save and provide end-game scoring opportunities.

But Dave… what about the asteroid?

How fast the asteroid moves, and how effective the projects are at stopping it, is determined by a little black bag. At the start of the game, it only contains black asteroid cubes. As you contribute to the different projects, you add cubes representing those projects to the bag. At the end of each round, you draw an increasing number of cubes from it.

Every black cube moves the planet one space closer to its fiery doom. Every project cube is placed on a separate board that tracks the progress of each project.

About three-quarters of the way along each track, there’s a symbol showing that the project is complete. Once one of these symbols is passed, or the asteroid collides with the planet, you stop taking turns and find out whether the projects were successful.

Starting with the laser beam, followed by the shield and then the evacuation, you check each project to see whether it managed to deter the angry space rock. If it did, you see who contributed the most and award them a huge amount of victory points. Second- and third-place contributors get some points as well, but coming first is really what you’re after.

After that, you check the remaining projects, also awarding victory points, although nowhere near as many, to the top contributors. Finally, everyone scores their green cards and you find out who the true saviour of the table really is.

You’d be surprised what three workers can do

While I think How to Save a World is pretty bog-standard in its worker placement mechanics and actions, saying that doesn’t really give you an idea of how interesting the surrounding systems are, or how tightly designed the actions you take actually feel. Almost everything you do provides some kind of upgrade. Whether that’s an increase to your starting resources each round, a free research action, or a tag, which I’ll get to in a second, you’re constantly increasing what you’re capable of.

Which is exactly what you need, because the asteroid doesn’t slow down.

That’s one of the core strengths of How to Save a World. You’re not just racing against the other players. You’re racing against the asteroid as well, trying to figure out your long-term plans and what you can get away with before the big bang. It’s compelling because How to Save a World manages to condense the kind of progression you’d normally find in a much larger game into something that takes around 45 minutes.

Another strategic consideration is the location-hopping of your workers. This is something I first saw and loved in On Mars, Vital Lacerda’s visit to the red planet, and I’m glad to see it here again. The implementation in How to Save a World is much friendlier, thanks to the shuttle option that lets you travel more than 300 kilometres in a single turn. But it still comes with a cost, which niggles your plans without completely derailing them.

Then there are the cards, which I think are all interesting in their own ways. Having only three workers severely limits the number of actions you can take, so the yellow cards are particularly useful throughout the game. The blue cards are tempting too, as they make the actions you’re already taking more efficient. Then there are the green cards, which provide another way to score points at the end of the game.

What makes this even more interesting is the way cards are priced. The cost is based on the resource matching the card’s colour, multiplied by the number of cards already in your hand. So if you have three cards and want to buy a blue card, it will cost you three blue resources.

The side-effect is that card acquisition is put under a microscope. Do you really want another card, or will picking it up now make it harder to afford an even better one later? They’re all good enough that I struggled to choose between them in pretty much every game I played, simply because there were too many good options. And I was always cursing myself when the next card turned out to be just that little bit better.

If that sounds too annoying to deal with, you can research ways to reduce the cost of cards. There are also spaces that let you discard cards to take more powerful actions, making future cards cheaper in the process.

Beyond all this, we need to talk about tags.

These can be found on cards and tokens you collect throughout the game, and can be spent to power different action spaces. For example, there’s a space that gives you two resources for every tag you spend. More importantly, though, some spaces allow you to contribute to projects as many times as you have tags to spend.

This is incredibly powerful. Not only can you use tags to become the top contributor at the end of the game, but there are also spaces along each project track that reward the first person to reach them with victory points. So get your tags right, and you can make a suprisingly large contribution to a project to sneak away some additional points… and potentially save the world in the process.

The asteroid has other plans

Now, why wouldn’t you like this game? Well, if you’re a dinosaur, you’re probably getting PTSD from a second impending asteroid. But even if you’re not, the asteroid might make you second-guess putting this game on your table.

You see, most worker placement games thrive on being strategy-based. You roughly know how long the game is, and how many rounds you have to work with to come up with the best strategy possible. How to Save a World doesn’t give you that certainty. With the asteroid moving an unknown number of spaces each turn, you never really know how long you have.

We had a couple of games that lasted eight or so rounds, giving us enough time to collectively save the planet. However, we also had a game that lasted only four rounds, and it felt like we were still just getting started.

This uncertainty adds a touch of excitement every time you pull cubes from the asteroid bag, but it can also be frustrating when you draw too many asteroid cubes and they blow up your plans.

A bad draw can mean that all the work you’ve put in doesn’t translate into many points at the end of the game. Especially because, even though you power up very quickly, it can be difficult to change which projects you’re primarily backing in the later stages of the game. Or at least, difficult to do so in a way that lets you score big points.

Thankfully, there’s still a lot of points up for grabs from the projects that weren’t successful, green cards, research options and the contribution tracks. So even if you can’t get on the podium for the successful project, you can usually nick enough points from across the board to still find your way to victory.

That’s the big question mark around How to Save a World. But if you can get past that, I think you’re in for a treat.

This is a fantastic mid-weight board game for anyone who loves worker placement strategy but wants their plans tested along the way. It has multiple paths to victory, exciting and compelling upgrades, and heck, even the process of putting cubes into or pulling them out of the bag was a lot of fun.

The only thing How to Save a World is missing is some dual-layer player boards. Because at the moment, a rogue table bump, or an eight-year-old near the board game table, is just about as bad as an asteroid when it comes to ruining your game.