I just finished the initial tutorial game and am liking it so far. I've only played in the game's first epoch (Bronze) which, with theI just finished the initial tutorial game and am liking it so far. I've only played in the game's first epoch (Bronze) which, with the guidance of the tutorial after skimming the rules, is very straight forward. Each later epoch adds significant complexity, so who knows if I'll be crying uncle soon enough.
The game is all about making production chains so as to complete the level's primary quest while, if clever enough, completing a few little sub-quests on the way for bonus points.
A production chain is as simple as placing a forest tile, and then later on, placing an adjacent lumbermill tile to that, which in turn can supply an adjacent paper mill, and so on. Just to throw in an additional minor snag to what could otherwise be fairly straight forward tile placement, these hexagonal tiles have different colored borders (only 2 different colors I believe), so that even if that 1 space would be a perfect fit for the paper mill, if you can't rotate that hex so as to have its colored borders match with the surrounding tile's borders, you can't place it there.
To add a bit of pizazz to this solo tile laying game, it also starts each turn rolling a few dice. This turn starting dice roll serves 2 purposes. The primary is to give you a random amount of building materials (while you'll always be rolling 4 d6, once you've built up your production chains a bit, you'll be using more higher quality dice with bigger values on them) but, if you end up rolling a few "diamonds" (just a single side of each die and the only non-building material result), a special event might occur. As far as I can tell these events can be either good or bad but, with the appropriate building tiles already in play, many of the bad results can be completely negated (actually be the source of positive bonus points as a reward for averting the potential disaster).
The game's campaign is a matter of taking the game's 5 kingdoms through the 4 epochs. Each kingdom has a unique starting configuration and successfully completing the level's primary goal will then unlock your ability to replay that specific kingdom in a later epoch. With each epoch many additional tiles will be added to boost the game's complexity (what started as just 2 basic production chains later will become some 6 or more intertwined bits to meddle through).
While I'm still just learning, I'd proudly give it a 4/5 so far but will happily change if I later learn of major shortcomings or that it really is even BETTER than I first thought.
UPDATE: Just played a bit of a free range game in which, in a single game you can traverse through multiple epochs. It started off simple enough but once the second epoch started things got NASTY. The concept of a tile needing MULTIPLE adjacent developed resources makes stuff REALLY tricky!… Expand
