Alderac Entertainment Group Planes Board Game

As the board game market becomes more saturated each year, some great titles like Planes are going to get overlooked. Planes is a very fun and flexible game designed around a familiar mancala mechanic, and also uses goal cards in a way similar to Takenoko. Here's why you shouldn't pass it up:-Easy to teach others how to play. You start with a group of 5 wooden cubes of your color, and move them around the board with the goal of getting each one onto your plane. Cards have text for both an action and a goal. You can choose to play one for its action before you move, and one afterward if its goal condition has been met. If you play one for its action, you discard it and cannot gain points from the goal. Thus you wager potential bonus points in order to get your cubes into better positions around the board. There are a couple of other rules, but that's the basic turn. The game ends after a round in which any player has boarded all 5 cubes, or 12 total cubes of any colors have boarded.-Plays in 10-15 minutes per player, depending on their experience with the game, and any customizations. Younger kids might initially need help with icons or reading cards.-Subtle strategies become apparent after the first game. It's not a brain-burner by any means, but after a few plays you start to weigh your decisions more carefully in choosing when to play cards, when to end movement, and which colors you leave in particular spaces.-Customizable to play as you like. One of my favorites is to sort the cards by color, so everyone starts with a personal deck identical to everyone else's. Cards are now more scarce in their distribution, putting greater emphasis on how and when to use them. The board is also double-sided: classic oblong mancala shape on one side, more challenging figure-8 on the other. You can customize any of the spaces on either board to make goals easier/harder to achieve, etc. Lots of flexibility, no expansion required.The components are colorful, and the player-assist cards that explain the game's icons are sized and printed to look like boarding passes on their flipsides. For what it's worth, Planes also has a relatively small footprint for a board game. I often play at a local cafe, and everything fits on a table for two, with room for coffee and scones. Highly recommended for 2 to 4 players who enjoy light strategy that plays in under an hour.

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This is a very dull and repetitive implication of a mancala mechanic.Not too many interesting choices to make.I would pass this up and get some other mancala game like Trajan, or Five Tribes.

Planes: 2-4 Players, Ages 14+, Average Play Time = 30 MinutesI found “Planes” to be pretty interesting, but it didn’t wow me in any particular way. Anyone who has played “Mancala” will easily see the correlation between the two games, though this one has cards that can be used as either actions or goals (the latter of which nets you more victory points). I liked this dual role that the cards played as I often felt torn between using an action to help my cubes board their plane and saving it to try and satisfy the listed goal. There were a few times using an action could have netted me a successful boarding attempt, though it’s perfectly viable to sit on them and hope your opponent changes the board in your favor with their move (allowing you to board the plane without spending your card as an action).The fact that you can use the points of interest tokens to change where they initially reside is a nice touch. If you don’t want them all to sit at the far ends of the board for example, then you can use blank tokens to cover some of those spaces up and put their matching tokens somewhere else. The manual recommends that for the sake of fairness that players keep things equal on both sides of the board, meaning if you place a help desk at G1 then you should also place one at G2, G3, and G4. There’s also a suggested hierarchy of availability listed (restrooms and fast food should be easier to find than help desks and restaurants, for example), though you’re free to mix things up at your leisure and unbalance the game however you’d like.In addition to being able to switch up the points of interest, you can separate the cards by player dot colors so that each player has the exact same 15 cards to use in a personal draw deck (as opposed to the standard public one which includes all cards). You can also shorten the game by playing to “8” instead of “12” on the boarding track…though you can choose any number you want. All of these customizable features gives “Planes” a lot of replayability and flexibility, which should hopefully keep you coming back for more (assuming you enjoy actually playing the game). At $20 (the price on Amazon as of 10/19/15), I recommend giving this one a go.

Planes Board game review for AmazonThis board game is one of the most realistic airport games made! The way the setup is, it’s like you’re right there in the airport. I like how each player has their own Player aids. They are quite useful in terms when you don’t know what to do with a card or something. The blockage cones are exactly the same use in a real airport! When the space get sup to 7 or more players, you just place the cone where the blockage is. The game is also very strategic. You have to get all 5 of your blocks boarded onto your plane. And in the process you drop blocks on spaces and you have to end up with one of your block colors and then you can board the plane. The game isn’t too big, and it has special airport add-ons. You can put restrooms and more things around the airport, if you don’t already have enough of those things. The action and goal cards sometimes don’t effect you, but there is one that really effects you in terms when you cannot get past a blocked area. Well, you can just use the Ignore all blockages action. Then you can zip right through the blockage without any trouble! But I still wish that there was a whole system for Air Traffic Control. Awesome game!

I like this game. Nothing ground breaking but definitely a keeper. Good with two players too. Although it has a mancala mechanism which is fun it's really more of a card game with a board game mechanism. The two blend well together.

This was a request from my college son for Christmas... yes they really do know what traditional board games are. He was so excited I found it... only on Amazon.