I’ve played Akropolis and Planet Unknown.
Akropolis is a competitive city builder where you’re having to make the choice of expanding outward or nullifying previous tiles by building on-top / upward for more points. I really enjoy it, my favorite new one of the year. (I tend to enjoy stylish, colorful, solo puzzley games)
Planet Unknown is a grid-planet that you’re terraforming with tetronimos. There are several tracks of environment types with different bonuses. I enjoyed the gameplay well enough but found it a little slow for my tastes; wife liked it more than I did.
What I did really appreciate is how replayable it seems. There are tons of planet variants, terrain tracks, and challenge cards that seem like you could really build the experience you want
Thanks for writing all this up! I have a friend group of mixed attention spans and this will be invaluable for next time. Asymmetric instruction is always such an uphill battle