Landing Party

How to play Landing Party

Aliens sit on a grid. You move one at a time.

• Click an alien, then click an empty square to send it there.
• The move only works if a clear path exists. Blocked routes are refused.
• Five of the same kind in a line, in any direction, teleports them away.
• If your move clears nothing, new aliens appear.
• The game ends when the board is full and nothing can move.

The path rule is the game

An alien travels through empty squares. It cannot pass through another alien, and it cannot jump.

This is why a board that looks half empty can be completely stuck. What matters is not how many free squares there are, it is whether they are connected. A grid split into two pockets by a diagonal wall of pieces is a grid where half your options have quietly disappeared.

What arrives next

The pieces due to appear are shown before they land. That preview is not decoration, it is the only planning information the game gives you, and ignoring it is the difference between surviving twenty moves and surviving eighty.

Tips and strategy

Why the first games end so fast

New players lose in under two minutes with plenty of empty squares still on the board, which is confusing until you see what actually happened.

They spent every move moving a piece next to another piece of the same kind, building outward from the middle, without once asking where the fifth would come from. Three moves later there are nine new aliens, the middle is solid, and the empty squares are in four separate pockets that nothing can travel between.

The board did not fill up. It fragmented. Those are different failures and only one of them is about space.

Build along the edges

Lines built through the middle of the board cut it in half. Lines built along an edge or a wall leave the open space in one connected piece.

The habit to build is to grow your groups toward a border rather than across the centre. It costs nothing and it keeps every square reachable.

Never make a line of four you cannot finish

Four of a kind with both ends blocked is four dead pieces occupying prime space for the rest of the game.

Before committing the fourth, look at where the fifth is coming from and whether it can physically get there. If the answer is no, put the piece somewhere else.

Use the preview properly

• If a colour you already have three of is arriving, plan where it should land.
• If pieces are arriving that will land near your almost complete line, clear the line first, this move.
• If the incoming pieces will land in your only open corridor, spend this move opening a second one.

Keep one clear lane

Reserve a row or a column that you never build in. It is the road that lets pieces cross the board late in the game, and it is the single habit that turns short games into long ones.

Every player who lasts a long time is protecting a lane, whether or not they would describe it that way.

Read the whole board every move

The temptation is to look only at the group you are building. The board is changing everywhere, and the piece that ruins you is usually the one you were not watching.

Before each move: where is the space, where is it about to be, and can everything still reach everything.

Counting the pressure

The board gains three pieces for every move that clears nothing, and loses five for every move that clears. So a move that fails costs you three squares and a move that succeeds gains two.

That arithmetic is why a run of three or four unproductive moves is so much worse than it feels. Nine or twelve new pieces arrive while you are trying to set something up, and the space you were planning to use is gone before you get there.

The lesson is not to avoid setting up. It is to prefer the setup that also clears something, even a less convenient one, over the perfect setup that clears nothing for two turns.

Close relatives here

Lumeno and 10x10 run on the same tension between clearing and filling. If you would rather the pressure came from a clock than from a shrinking board, match 3 is the other direction. More in puzzle.