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They came to this planet, and they chose you. They uplifted your people and promised great prosperity. They provided the wisdom and the resources to build your cities sky high. They taught you the ways of culture, science, and warfare. They promised knowledge for any willing to learn. Come, Archon, guide your citizens to victory, under the watchful eyes of the Builders, our benefactors from beyond the skies above.
In Origins: First Builders, you are an archon, guiding a population of freemen, influencing the construction of buildings and monuments, climbing the three mighty zodiac temples, and taking part in an arms race — all in an effort to leave the greatest mark on mankind’s ancient history.
You start the game with a city consisting of just two building tiles: the Agora tile and the Palace tile. As the game develops, your city will grow in both size and strength as you add new building tiles, each of which has a special ability that triggers when it is first added to a city and when closing a district. Your placement on the military track indicates the rewards you receive when you attack and your chances of becoming first player.
Origins: First Builders is played over a number of rounds, with a round ending only after each player has passed. If a game end condition has not yet been triggered, the game continues with a new round. On your turn, you perform one of the following actions:
• Visit an encounter site with your workers to gain resources and additional citizen or speaker dice, advance on the zodiac temple tracks (and potentially gain zodiac cards), and advance and attack on the military track.
• Close a district, gaining victory points (VPs) and possibly gold for matching a district card’s building pattern, additional bonuses based on the buildings you activate, and additional VPs at the end of the game based on the value of the citizen die you use to close the district.
• Build a tower level to increase your endgame scoring based on the tower heights and the matching color dice you use to close your districts.
• Grow your population.
• Pass.
The game finishes at the end of the round when one or more of the following conditions has been met:
At most three colors of tower disks are still in stock.
No gold remains above any district card.
No citizen die of the proper color can be added to the citizen offer.
A player has moved all three of their zodiac disks to the top space of each temple track.
The temple area is divided into three tracks: the sea temple, the forest temple, and the mountain temple. You score points only for your two least-valued temples, and once all the points have been summed, whoever has the most VPs wins.
Ages | 14+ |
---|---|
Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players |
Play Time | 60m – 120m |
Designer | Adam Kwapiński |
Mechanics | Drafting, Turn Order: Stat-Based, Variable Set-up, Worker Placement with Dice Workers, Tile Placement |
Theme | City Building, Civilization, Dice, Ancient |
Publisher | Board&Dice |
agorski
It's difficult to build your city and do a secondary point engine as well. I'd like to know how you can possibly win with a temple track strategy.
adel9591
I love dice as workers and this game is one of the best I've played as far as implementation of the mechanic (especially the aging workers). The city building and tracks felt a little unconnected though, just sort of all over the place and incoherent. Would definitely give it another shot.
fjaoaoaoao
Pretty obvious by now, but they should have marketed and designed the theme completely differently. This really is an abstract euro at its core. Even some of the more popular, most distinct euros that come to mind have much stronger connections to the theme. For example, there's very little about this game that is about aliens. There is some minor sense of city building to give it the civilization label, but it's a bit limited. On top of that, most of the building tiles are just direct point scorers so there's no sense of city management and only a minute degree of population management via the freemen/advisors. Thus, this game's issue is a matter of thwarted expectations. They really marketed this game as an alien city-state game, from the box to the description to the tagline to the action descriptions... but they should have taken a different approach. There's nothing wrong with putting a theme on after the mechanics have been made, but that theme should really integrate into the mechanics and it doesn't here. Something that would have made more sense is some sort of engineering / natural resource management for a pasted on theme. Perhaps a bunch of entrepreneurs taking on the management of a dam in the 17th century? Just a thought. I got excited when I saw this game pop up on bgg and the description seemed awesome. What a cool idea to take an alternate history approach to civilization building. I pre-ordered it without really diving into the rules. Oops, that was a mistake. Having said all that, there are some redeeming mechanics, and it's fun to play around with die and have them grow. The components are well made though it's a bit jarring to have nice components and then have extremely cheap-o looking resources and on top of that so few of them.