Designed by: Andrew Chiarvesio,Pierluca Zizzi
If the large box and multiple components look bewildering, the game itself is surprisingly straightforward. The theme of Hyperborea is in some future, fantasy, post-apocalyptic world, and the players represent different peoples striking out across the landscape, taking control of empty cities and ruins and reaping the benefits.
To do this they must defeat the ghosts nestled in the cities – and more than likely, each other too.
How the game is played is to a certain degree down to chance. Each player has a bag of different coloured cubes (everyone starts with 7 cubes, but you add more as you play) and you pull three from your bag at a time, and allot them to different rows on your personal player board. When a row is complete it triggers an action – moving, fighting or adding more people to the main board, collecting gems, or pushing up different coloured tracks on your personal board, that will in turn get you more cubes. Another option is to ‘buy’ Technology cards which give you yet more options.
Moving people around on the main board brings rewards as well – your people can move into cities or ruins and these generate extra actions – the catch being they are now stuck there until your cube bag is empty and you ‘reset’ by filling it up with cubes again and at that point, pull your people out of the cities/ruins.
The game is over when certain conditions are met – getting all your people on the main board, buying a fifth Technology card, or collecting a twelfth gem. Depending on how many players you have, once either one, two, or all three of these conditions are met, the round is played out and the game ends. Points are scored for gems, cards, cubes, and control of hexes on the main board.
The key to the game is your choice of cubes, because different coloured cubes align themselves to different strategies – exploring, fighting, collecting gems, or just racing to end the game as quickly as possible.
Players are trying to control the hexes on the board - the middle hex is particularly alluring - so there will be combat.
Occasionally there are a lot of options to choose from, so the game can lurch from fast to slow and back again. The box's guide of 25 minutes per player seems fair though, once players are familar with it.
There's not a great deal of maths - the main thing to think over is tactics.
It's nigh-on impossible for Hyperborea to play the same way twice - the hexes are assigned randomly, cubes come out of the bags randomly, and therefore players' decisions and tactics will change too.
2-6
Players
10+
Years
90-120
Mins
Sam says
You need to be into the theme to get into the game, I think, and although I don't particularly go for post-apocalyptic type scenarios, I did really like the mechanic of drawing cubes from the bag and deciding tactics from there. My son loved it.