Archive for the 'Clash of Cultures' Category

A player board can be seen at the bottom of the picture. Notice the cubes in the square holes marking the advances gained.

Clash of Cultures is a civilisation building game by the designer of Merchants and Marauders and this sole fact meant it was on my ‘must play’ list as Merchants & Marauders was a superb game.  In Clash of Cultures, players start as rival tribes in corners of the realm with no technology.  Over 6 rounds, the players explore the land, generate resources, build cities, create technologies, trade, potentially fight each other, and do whatever they can to be the most successful.  At the end of the game, victory points (VPs) are scored for building cities (1VP per piece), advances in technology (1/2VP each), completing objective cards (2VP each) and building wonders (5VP each) – the player with the most VPs wins.

GAME
The board/map is made of tiles (each showing 4 hexes) of various types: water, mountains, barren, grassland, forest.  Unexplored regions remain face-down until entered when a player turns the tile over and sometimes gets a choice on its orientation.

Players all start the same with 1 settler, the Farming and Mining advances and 1 basic city.  During the game, cities can be improved by adding a port, academy, temple and/or fortress.  The size of a city is equal to the total number of pieces – the bigger the size, the more resources it collects and influence it has; however, city size is limited by the number of cities you own so you can’t just have one super-city.  A city that is happy functions like a city of 1 larger size; whereas, an angry city functions like a city of size 1. Read the rest of this entry »

More games to watch out for at Spiel.  (I’ve combined all the Spiel games on my radar on my Essen 2012 page.)

Phantom (Ludonaute)
A 2-player game announced today by Ludonaute who say some people call Phantom a mixture of ‘Lost Cities’ with elements of ‘Magic: The Gathering’.  That’s a lot to live up to and I really hope it does as there have been few great 2-player games in recent years.  The game has players playing two restless ghosts in a house trying to scare the current occupants more than the other player by creating apparitions in the 4 areas of the house.  It sounds really interesting.
Check out the details and rules at Ludonaute’s web site: bga.me/phantom

La Loire (Emanuele Ornella)
I like Emanuele Ornella’s games (Il Principe, Charon Inc, Assyria) so I am looking forwards to his new one.  Players move merchants and messengers around the Loire Valley with an interesting game mechanic where they have to move the number of spaces equal to the number of horses with the piece being moved (and this number can change).  The location a piece ends on dictates the action the player can take, like buy or deliver messages, buying goods, build buildings, move their ship down the river, etc.  (If you’ve read this blog for a while, I interviewed him some time back.)
Check out the details and rules on Ornella’s web site: bga.me/loire

Nieuw Amsterdam (White Goblin)
A game of buying land, gathering wood and corn, buying furs, and shipping for profit.  Whilst that may sound fairly regular, there are some neat game mechanics that make it sound like it’ll feel different to other games.  The core mechanic is that players bid on sets of actions and the each type of action can be used for a few different effects.  Also, timing clearing your land to gather wood is important, and you can’t grow corn there unit you do.  Plus, there’s some area control too which gives you an advantage when using special actions rather than outright ownership of them which appears a nice balance.  Also, the setting of New Amsterdam (Old New York) is nicely original.  (How long before we can all agree that New York is longer new and can just be called York?)
Check out the details and rules at White Goblin’s web site: bga.me/NieuwAms

Clash of Cultures (Z-Man Games)
A civilisation game by the designer is the excellent Merchants and Marauders.  I know little more than that at present but that has me sold already.

Pyramidion (White Goblin)
White Goblin has two Egyptian-themed games this year and Pyramidion sounds interesting.  One of the 8 locations is selected and players allocate some of their people (cards) to it and each card has 3 characteristics (numbers).  If a player’s group doesn’t have enough of the first characteristic, they all get discarded.  Players with the highest totals of the second and third characteristics get various benefits.  Also, who doesn’t like a game with Merchants, Negotiators and Torturers??
Check out the details and rules at White Goblin’s web site: bga.me/pyramidion