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Origins: First Builders
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 |
Fausticus1
An interesting dice worker placement game. There's a lot going on while the actions are simple. There are different ways of getting high scores and you are able to ignore some of them without suffering for it.
dddoni
Very abstract. 3 temple tracks + 1 combat (??) track. This part has zero theme. But the buildings, the adjacency puzzle, the activation and the towers are amazing. I'd play a game that has only this part.
GarcianIII
Interesting-in-a-vacuum mechanisms add up to a fairly piecemeal collective experience. First up, the theme feels like a desperate attempt to diversify in an observably busy civ building marketplace. Except, as shown with recent releases such as Khora, I think a game can still play it straight and hold its head high above the parapet of the market. The alien tech theme never really comes to the fore. Next up, and talking very abstractly here (as my children run around the room shouting "Ehhhyyy" ) all of the mechanisms just feel a little too "smooth", and much like a curved surface, all interesting thought fired at the game from the nozzle of your brain or fingertips, just seems to refract and deflect off that surface. There is nothing really to lodge into here. No juicy mechanism to savour or play with. Over the course of a game, you will not only see it all, but will likely do it all and feel it all too. Layered on top of that is the feeling that many of the building abilities and more precisely the zodiac abilities, feel unexciting. Rather than unlocking a new paradigm for your internal thought structure, they activate more like another pebble plopped within the ocean of your thoughts. After a while, it all just kind of blends together and you start to care a little less each time you activate an ability. All of those thought pebbles build up to nothing more than the nondescript floor of a fish tank. Not that good plays don't exist. They clearly do, but it never feels invigorating to pull off a chain reaction. And finally we have the dice. They work fairly well. I love the ageing mechanism and how they can become advisors as "sixes" which augment the power of your miniature. It feels right and well earned. And clever. I then like the trade off of spending your workers and placing them in seats of power. Given tenure and gone forever. Many aspects of the game are clever, such as this, but they don't combine or pour into each other in a satisfactory way.