Finished a couple games. Was thrashed in both. Attached are a few pics from one game.
Pregame setup. Game quality is excellent, and not over the top. Nice wood meeples for workers, flood, barge and for brick and wood resources, as well as farms, huts, and outposts.
Cardboard punchouts for provisions and shells.
Card quality is great as well.
Art is good, iconography is easy to grasp after the initial learning curve.
The theme of the game is that you have to build a canal before the flood destroys everything. While doing this you are attacked by barbarians. You have to use your townsfolk to generate resources, build the town, build the canal, and avoid getting overrun by barbarians
You win by completing the canal. You lose if the flood hits before you’re done, or barbarians kill everyone.
The loss conditions are satisfied through 2 types of countdown timers.
The first is running out of townfolk. You start with a deck of 10 cards that represent the townfolk. You draw 4 cards from the deck each turn. You then play from that hand to do actions. Mostly this is generating a small number of resources, or you can discard the card from your deck for more or rarer resources, or you can tuck the card in board spaces to generate resources each turn. You can also discard cards from your deck for powerful actions, or as a consequence of other things in the game.
Every turn you draw 4 more cards, and once your deck is empty, you shuffle and start again. Each time you do that the flood advances. That is the first countdown.
The townsfolk not in your deck aren’t out of the game, they are used across the top as a supply. You can spend provisions to buy more townsfolk for your deck, or to generate resources. Opposing this is a deck of barbarians. As you build the canal more barbarians are drawn each turn, reducing the available townfolk to draw. If you don’t defeat barbarians each turn, then they will destroy resources from your supply, force you to discard from your deck while simultaneously making your supply of townsfolk smaller. If Barbarians ever fill all the slots in your town, you lose.
Here is me losing (kids showed up to play with the bits I wasn’t using)
This is also a campaign game, so certain cards trigger story events. In my game I triggered a famine, which made me discard cards for food - making the game even more difficult. As you go you will add and remove cards from the game, but it is super simple to reset.
I like worker placement, but it isn’t my normal game and I probably kind of suck at them. I find this game to be extremely challenging. One mistake in building your engine sends the whole thing out of balance and likely sends you on the path to a loss. It was much more difficult then solo Viticulture and Maquis.
But I do like it, as there are enough actions to burn the brain a bit as you try to find the solution to the puzzle. I also like the campaign aspect, as I’m a sucker for the treadmill of new things and changes.
For me, this is a big thumbs up, even though I’ve yet to win!
