Not to be confused with the completely unrelated Terra Mystica reimplementation Gaia Project (Feuerland Spiele), Gamestorm's Project Gaia is a mostly cooperative game of saving the world, one action at a time. The premise of this game, by designer Stephen Baker, is that humanity has entrusted planet Earth's climate control to AI but the AI has determined that the biggest threat to the world's stability is humanity itself and so it has set about trying to wipe out mankind through instigating natural disasters.
In order to shut down the eponymous AI 'Project Gaia', the player's team of heroes must scramble to locate the shutdown code, which means travelling to the moon, to Mars and to the Gaia station orbiting the Earth, looking for the right tokens. Everything is hazardous, especially space travel, which requires the characters on board the spaceship to pass a series of die-based skill checks. There are ways to prepare and optimise your chances, and these journeys are among the most exciting parts of the game, but people who don't like dice may have a problem with this fundamental aspect of the game!
However, the biggest luck factor in this game is nothing to do with the dice. At the beginning of the game, there is only one climate drone, and throughout the game more drones will be revealed as either active or inactive. The number of active drones determines how quickly the planet will be overwhelmed by disaster, and there is not much scope for deactivating them, so there is a huge difference between the swift catastrophe of quickly uncovering lots of active drones and the easy cakewalk of completing the objectives with barely a scratch on the blue planet.
If the game does pan out easily tho', that's where the 'mostly' cooperative nature of the game can turn a bit more back-stabby. Players score points for the bonus cards they play and for the code segments they retrieve, and there are ways to play selfishly to increase one's own score without necessarily helping the team - even sabotaging other player's opportunities!
There is a lot to enjoy here, in a game that's easy to learn and play despite having such a broad scope with many things going on. Nearly everything flows logically and simply from one stage to the next, which isn't the case for all games like this by any means. Even when Gaia brutally destroys everything, you'll still feel like your game has told a story that was fun to tell, and you can't ask for much more than that.
(Review by Matt Young)