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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 |
charleaux
Another very good Euro from Board & Dice and I really enjoyed the combination of tile-laying, worker placement, and dice drafting mechanisms. Hard to believe this is coming from the same designer as Lords of Hellas and Nemesis. My biggest gripe is the production, the pips on the ships are hard to see from far away and some of the resources are way too close to each other in color. Despite these issues, the gameplay itself is very good and a game I would definitely go back to.
Electropuncher
What I like: Lot of things to juggle. A really interesting timing puzzle with the increasing difficult placement of dice. City building, while light, feels rewarding. Really cool art. What I dislike: Military track regression every round feels very punishing. Disappearing workers that beef up your big worker is annoying, because you lose your workers. Not sure making the workers dice that increase pips every round you use them is particularly a great design choice. Cheap, cheap, CHEAP components. Literally doesn't have enough tokens (had a sheet of gold tokens taped to my box originally). Takes way too long at four. Too many discrete components with unique text that's in like 4pt font and halfway across the table. Extremely fiddly die placement and endgame is pretty wonky, too. Reminder cards aren't really clear on what your actions do. Not enough player aids. Theme actively makes the game harder to figure out. Overall: I kind of liked it, but I was alone at the table on this. Weird to think this is the same guy who did Nemesis and Lords of Hellas. Not a fan of this one. Sadly bound for the sell pile. Sold at G+ fall 2022 auction.
cfarrell
So, Boards&Dice has been on a little bit of a roll for me; but it’s not clear to me why anyone would use the extremely racist “ancient aliens” conspiracy theory as the seed idea for a setting for a game? The idea that aliens built the pyramids or whatever is just Europeans not being able to believe that anyone who was not white was capable of doing sophisticated things. It’s toxic and extremely offensive. It seems that Origins is using Chariots of the Gods? as its source material, which has slightly widened the net to include Christianity as an influence of ancient aliens, but there is a reason why the (western) popular imagination is focused on the pyramids and Moai (hint: it’s racism). Also: that book is trash. Anyway. I don’t know what the designer’s real intent was here. I’d be shocked if there was racist intent - by all counts the illustrations in the game feature a diverse cast - and he probably just didn’t really think about it. Still, this is a thing that probably just should not have been done. It’s the racism that you don’t think about that really gets you.