Unsettled

Unsettled is not so much a game but a series of games – or, to immerse ourselves in the ludic world of this title, a series of planets to be explored. The base game contains two planets, with three narrative puzzles apiece, but more can be purchased separately. All are replayable and can be visited in any order: Unsettled is not a campaign or legacy game. But naturally replaying a ‘story’ is never as fresh and surprising as a first visit, so bear that in mind.

In the base game is a hefty rulebook of 40 or so pages. If that sounds daunting, be reassured that you only need to read the first half before playing, and may never need the rest (appendices, sample turns etc) at all… but still, there’s a fair bit to wrap your head around here. We’ll try to give a brief overview, without straying into spoiler territory.

The gist is that players are landing on planets and them exploring them. It’s not a game of combat – although the planets are hardly safe! – but an undertaking of curious scientifically-minded exploration, navigated across a grid of cards (or ‘nodes’ as Unsettled terms them) that represent the landscape around you. As you explore, however, problems crop up that must be resolved. How do you resolve them?

Well, you have a default movement value of one, that allows you to pass from one node to the next. You also control a robot-assistant called Luna who can move as well, and also scan for materials and data – we’ll come back to materials and data shortly. You use your focus cubes to take actions, which include gathering the aforementioned data and materials, moving/carrying, investigating opportunities on the planets, theorizing your insight track into breakthrough comprehensions, supporting each other, charging up power and, lest we forget, resting. You’ve three focus cubes and on each turn one of them must rest – and resting costs time, the most precious resource of all.

As the narrative of actions and objectives plays out, comprehensions and discoveries give you additional actions (which are powered by the data/materials/power). Each mission has a ‘book’ of 8 pages that sets the scene and supplies you with an objective: when the objective is completed, turn the page to see what you need to do next. The issue is that ‘resting’ costs time, focus cubes can cost time, movement can cost time and every time the time track reaches the top and resets to the bottom, all players lose endurance – when endurance reaches zero, you’re unconscious, and if all players endurance reaches zero, you collectively lose.

Add in a few more concepts like trust, distress, infection, and buildings, and if you weren’t there already you can probably now guess that Unsettled is not the simplest game. That said, it does kind of come together on playing, and by your third mission – or third attempt at one – you’ll find things do start to run a little smoother; in comprehension if not success.