“And the so-called sovereigns, in these different governments, are simply the heads, or chiefs, of different bands of robbers and murderers.” – Lysander Spooner

In this free PDF game from Greg Porter at BTRC, you and your buddies assume roles as leaders of various real-life nations of the world. Your goal is to try to manipulate global resources in a manner most beneficial to your own country. If your buddies’ nations get screwed over in the process, well, welcome to the real world, sunshine!

The idea is for each player to control both natural and man-made resources and finances during the game to push their own country ahead of the other players’, and to avoid catastrophes along the way. Catastrophes are, unfortunately, generated by the stress on your population by the manipulation of said resources, so it’s rather a catch-22. You have to figure out how far to push your tech, industry, and material reserves without causing a national health, economic, or environmental crisis to strike. Or, at least, how to cause such a crisis to nail your opponents instead of you. By successfully wheeling and dealing, producing, buying, trading, selling, researching, and bargaining, you’ll earn Victory Points every game turn. Eventually, someone will trigger one of the “victory conditions” of the game, and then each player has one final turn to try to accumulate the most Victory Points to become the winner.

The full-color PDF rules include a printable “board”, nation info sheets, resource tokens, and handy in-game reference sheets for players to use during their turns. The board is simply a track to monitor how close to various types of catastrophes your nations are inching during game play, but it also has tables for Black Market and Free Market Trading.

Each player will need about 15 tokens, and you can either use those provided or substitute poker chips, beads, pennies, toenail clippings, whatever, as long as each person has a different color or otherwise easily-identifiable set of tokens to clearly represent their nation. It’s a good idea to print the playing board and tokens on heavier cardstock paper if you have it, just so they hold up better and don’t blow around when someone gets up from the table to grab a soda. The pieces and nation sheets should also be printed in color for ease of play, because while there are identifying emblems on the tokens and the nation info sheets, the attributes of each nation are color-coded to let you know how potent a particular attribute is. (I didn’t have a color printer at work, so I had to use highlighters to brighten up my tokens and nation print-outs, which worked fine, but was time-consuming.)

There is a selection of nations to choose from to begin play, with each nation statted out on a short sheet for the player. Each nation has five attributes:

• Reserves: your country’s knack for keeping strategic reserves on hand to use to mitigate emergencies.
• Lifestyle: a combo quality of your standard of living and your population.
• Tech: what technological stuff you’re capable of making, although not necessarily what you have currently on hand.
• Industry: related to tech, this indicates how much stuff you can produce and how quickly.
• Resources: Potential assets such as materials, work force, energy sources, agriculture, etc.

Since not every country in the world is equal, neither are the starting stats of the nations. However, nations that begin the game with fewer advantages in these attributes receive more Victory Points from the get-go, to even things out. Japan, for example, starts with only 4 VP, while the Pacific Rim starts out with 17 VP. This means that while the Rim starts out closer to the win, Japan will have moderately better production rolls for their five attributes during the game and can generally gain VP faster than The Pacific Rimmers, if managed shrewdly.

Each nation also has three Special Abilities that they can activate after the game gets going, and sometimes these abilities help offset lower VP starting levels. Special Abilities may be things like market manipulation, foreign aid, outsourcing, or military benefits. You have to pay for these Special Abilities by spending tokens to buy them, so you won’t be able to begin the game on the first turn with these Special Abilities active.

Now, understanding the set-up is tricky at first, because you have lots of colored circles all over the place on your nation’s sheet. Before play starts, you’ll set tokens on your sheet’s attributes according to your attributes’ circles’ colors, so everyone starts off with some tokens in play. As the game progresses, you’ll move, remove, or replace tokens on some of these circles, which will have various effects based on which circle is filled. Token placement’s all described in the rules, of course, but it took me a few readings to understand which circles are which, since everything on the nation sheet is pretty damn round.

“...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification.” - B.H. Liddell Hart

Once you’re set up, a basic game turn goes in a set sequence, but sometimes all the players participate in certain steps of the turn at the same time, and sometimes players are performing steps individually. You’ll most likely want to devise your arcane strategy for winning from the start; if you want to go for the win on your own, trusting no one and taking the lead, you’ll be better off with a lower VP nation as you’ll have better chances to develop your resources faster. If you plan on schmoozing, cooperating, and assisting your fellow players along the way in return for certain concessions, then you can feel more comfortable starting off with a second or third tier country, which will have less access to resource tokens during a given round but start off with a hefty dose of VP.

I have to be honest; I’m not even going to try to thoroughly explain/describe a complete turn of play, because it would basically require a re-write of the rules, and I haven’t got that kind of energy. There’s a lot going on in Soft Landing each turn. I’m just going to walk you through a rough idea of what happens.

Very basically, the player with the lowest VP score goes first. The first step for everyone to move tokens around as needed. Red circles get tokens removed, green circles receive tokens, and blue or yellow circles don’t do squat. Since actions you want to take on your turn are fueled by tokens, this shuffling of tokens may or may not help you out at the onset of the turn.

Then, a six sided die is rolled. Each of your nation’s five attributes has a number or range of numbers associated with it. For example, your Reserves attribute might be labeled “1-2”. If the D6 number rolled matches a number on your attribute, you put a token on that attribute. (So if a one or a two were rolled, your Reserves circle would get a token.)

Each nation can then use its Special Abilities, if they want (and if they’ve readied them with tokens during a previous turn.) Using these abilities may garner you VPs, or allow you to shift tokens related to your special ability around your nation sheet to your advantage, or affect the Catastrophe Zone tracks to hold off global crisis for one more day.

Whether you use Abilities or not, you may opt to do some black market or free market trading to get tokens you need. This seems useful, but beware that every time someone buys or sells on one of the markets, the price then goes up or down for the other players, respectively. Too many people going to the markets for the same resources drive the prices way up, so buying resources from the markets becomes more costly as the game goes on.

You could also opt to put tokens into the New Tech Era, a vaguely defined resource representing the nations moving towards some major technological breakthrough for the 21st century. Placing tokens in the New Tech Era resource allows you to remove tokens from a Catastrophe track, thus holding off impending doom a bit longer during the game. (Tech Era allows for some other tricks, too, but that’s what you need to know for now.)

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.” – Douglas MacArthur

Next, players check for Stress. Certain circles on the nation sheets left uncovered by tokens indicate that your nation lacks the ability to supply what’s needed for your evolving country, and this causes global stress. This world-wide freak out factor is represented by adding markers to the stress tracks on the playing board, thus driving the world towards a Catastrophe, with a capital “C.” To check to see if disaster strikes during a given turn, dice are rolled, with the target number being higher than the number of tokens in a given stress track. If your roll is less than the number of stress tokens… uh ooooh.

So, what’s the big whoop about Catastrophes? To quote the rulebook, “Catastrophes are generally very, very bad.” Well, there are minor and major mishaps that can occur. Minor boo-boos cause the player(s) with the highest VP score to lose a Victory Point. Major blunders cause a loss of 3 VPs. As if this didn’t suck enough, one catastrophe can set off other catastrophes on the track, causing even more point loss to the same, or different, players.

On top of all of that, the nations that most contributed to the catastrophe (whoever has the most of their nations’ tokens on that stress track) get slammed with aftereffects, such as losing useful tokens from their nations’ attribute circles. The type of catastrophe that hits dictates exactly how players are affected. For example, political disasters remove tokens from your Outsourcing abilities, while environmental screw-ups remove tokens from your Global Trade and Lifestyle circles. Part of the devious strategy of the game is to set up scenarios where your opponents get the worst blowback for contributing to the catastrophe, and thus are on the receiving end of this fallout, making it harder for them to manage their nations effectively and score or buy up Victory Points. To again quote the rulebook, “One of your greatest joys as a destructive player will be causing multiple other people to be blamed for a major catastrophe.”

After stress and global catastrophes are dealt with, players may all invest tokens in buying their Special Abilities back up for the next round, or they may spend tokens to outright buy VPs.

That’s a turn, more or less. Then the whole shebang starts over. At some point, something will happen to trigger an end game: a nation can bring about a New Tech Era, two major catastrophes can occur, or any player reaches 30 VPs. Once one of these happens, the game continues for one last turn, and whoever has the most VP after that wins. Note that the person who triggered the 30 VP end game won’t necessarily win; if others are close to 30 VP as well, they could bring the front runner down with a catastrophe, or amass enough VP of their own on the final turn to surge ahead and win. (Or someone could simply claim to be the winner, and if discovered to not, in fact, have the most points, they could blame the miscount on dangling chads…)

The rule book wraps up with five optional variants for game play, including a two-player version.

In sidebars throughout the rules, and in a short section near the book’s end, the designer offers tactics and tips for playing, but really, the best way to devise a winning global strategy seems to be to play the game repeatedly to get the feel for it. Even using the same nations for each game, the game play and outcome can be radically different depending on how bloodthirsty or cooperative the players are. Soft Landing seems to have solid replay value, and is a great game for strategists and plotters who enjoy relying on their wits rather than a randomizer for their sweet, sweet victories.

Also, you’ll be stuck with the nation sheets provided with the game, so you aren’t able to play any new nations even once you’ve gotten the hang of Landing. There are no rules for designing new real-world or imaginary lands, so I hope you don’t have your heart set on playing the Sioux Nation or a tribe of New Zealand Maori.

If you plan on playing the game repeatedly, it would well be worth the effort of printing it on cardstock of some thick sort, or laminating it, or gluing it to a heavier-duty backing than just the writing paper most printers use. Especially if you use the printed tokens; one good sneeze from Eastern Europe and your game board is screwed.

“However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.” – Jacques Yves Cousteau

This is a well-designed, intricate, crafty game. It’s not so much about world domination as it is about resource control and agenda manipulation, so it’s a thinking man’s pastime, and a fantastic opportunity for some table-side conniving and deal making. It can be a straightforward power rush to the finish, or an evening of international relations that would make a UN negotiation seem like a Girl Scout campfire. If the subtle machinations of global policy are your cup of sake, then Soft Landing will be your kind of game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a black market tech deal to broker, and China’s just moved us one step closer to a cascading international banking default of epic proportions. Gotta run.

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