Two Factions per Color: Green can flip the Faeries over to play as the Druids, and Blue can flip over the Water Sprites to play as the Sea Dogs.Īs players drop out, they claim the next space in turn order for next round, with the first to drop out claiming the first-player token (a 3D shovel), the next taking second position, etc. After each player has done one action, the cycle starts again, looping around until each player decides to pass and exit play for the round. Once houses have been placed, players play out 5 rounds, taking turns in player order, each performing just one of a dozen or so possible actions. But after that, the game veers off so you quickly realize you’re playing a much deeper game. And you even start the game placing 2 of your houses in a snake draft. The board itself is just a bunch of hexagons, though not modular like Catan. Most of the wooden pieces seem to have been repurposed from surplus pieces from that 1995 classic. If you were to open the box without any Terra Mystica experience, you might be tempted to think you’d stumbled onto an alternate-reality version of Settlers of Catan. If not, it might seem like a Catan variant before you dive in. If you know Terra Mystica, this is clearly its sibling. It’s quick enough that after you finish a game you might want to play again as a different faction, perhaps by just flipping over your faction board and trying the other faction available for each player color. Your first game might take a while to assimilate the rules, but your second game can be finished in an hour, even with four players. After five rounds, players receive endgame points for coins and for the relative size of their territorial reach, and a winner is crowned. Players take turns over five rounds, dropping out of each round when they run out of things they can afford to do, or perhaps earlier than that for strategic reasons. This lets them build houses, trading posts, and fortresses, and from those components, create towns that earn sizable bonuses in currency, advancements, or pure points. In Terra Nova, players work to get as much of the game’s two currencies (coins and power tokens) as they can to transform the landscape into their preferred terrain type. Terra Nova can stand on its own as a solid, mid-weight Euro, and doesn’t deserve to be thought of only as a “dumbed-down” Terra Mystica. Authorship is credited to Andreas Faul, but a huge debt of the content is owed to the original creators of Terra Mystica, Helge Ostertag and Jens Drögemüller, because Terra Nova is not so much a truly new game as an example of asking “what if we shaved off all the rococo ornamentation from Terra Mystica so that the game could be taught in 10 minutes and everyone could just dive in?” Which is how Terra Nova saved my Terra Mystica experience from a perpetual state of “gosh, I sure wish I could learn to play this” and finally brought a version to the table for multiple plays of a really approachable, mid-weight Euro.īut enough about the comparisons with its sister game. Terra Nova is an ostensibly new game from Captone Games (and venerable German publishing house KOSMOS in Europe).
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