Gheos

In the game Gheos, you are Gods, playing – well, God – with the advancement of several tribes of people as you create the world around them. The process of doing so simple: add a triangular tile to an expanding network of such tiles. But the decisions about which tile and where it goes is somewhat more complex.

You’ll have a hand of three tiles and on your turn, you play a single tile and draw back up to three. The tiles can go anywhere: showing a mix of land mass and water, all tiles connect in one way or another. If you begin a new continent, which is any land mass that still has room for expansion, you must add a coloured disc there denoting the existence of a new tribe. If you do so, you get matching  followers (- the cubes) of the amount of wheat symbols on the new continent. If you didn’t begin a new continent, you may take a follower of any one of the tribes that currently exist on the board. Followers will score points, but before we get to that it’s worth noting what the other symbols on the tiles do.

There are three basic symbols in wheat, swords and cups. Cups are an avenue to point-scoring: everyone one has three scoring tokens and may choose to cash one in and get points equal to followers of a tribe they own x cups in territories that tribe currently controls. Swords perhaps unsurprisingly are there to settle differences between the tribes. It’s very easy to join up two separate continents because not only can you build outwards from existing tiles, you can also build on top of them. If two tribes are joined when this happens, it’s war, and the side with most swords will basically wipe out the lesser tribe: they are gone from play and so are any followers you owned of that tribe.

Lastly wheat decides where a migrating tribe will go: just as you can bring divergent continents together, you can also split a continent as well. In this instance the tribe will migrate to the land mass with the most wheat on it, and the player who split the continent may start a new tribe on the other, newly-minted, continent.

It’s worth bearing in mind however that to cause a war or migration you must pay a follower of your own back to the supply.

There are some other symbols too: temples that provide instant points when joined to continents with matching symbols (a cup temple joined to a continent with three cups = three points) and pyramids that score when an Epoch tile is drawn.

Mixed into the draw-pile are nine such Epochs. When one of these is drawn, everybody scores a point per pyramid, and a new tile is drawn. When the eighth Epoch is drawn the game instantly ends: all tribes score one final time and the player with the most points wins.