Rise of Tribes

As the name suggests, in Rise of Tribes you oversee the development of your own tribe in the harsh landscape of early man: expanding in numbers and geography, harvesting resources, developing technology – and in a terrible portent of what is to come over the next few thousand years, killing each other.

The board is actually made up of landscape hexes, the number of which varies depending on the amount of players. Everyone starts with four tribespeople on a single hex, and sixteen more to be potentially added. On your turn you take two distinct actions from an available four: Grow sees you add more tribespeople to hexes you control, Move lets you migrate to other parts of the world, Gather allows you to harvest resources (stone, wood, food) depending on the hexes you occupy, and Lead is a kind of cultural advancement of your tribe – you get to flip some objective cards that can be paid for with your resources. Some simply score points; others give you ongoing in-game advantages, such as the Horse to offer advanced movement, or the Bow to take out the enemy.

Ah, the enemy. In Tribes, there’s not a whole lot of room to spread around and you’ll quickly find yourself fighting for space. Tribes hate to share, so at the end of any turn where more than five tribe members occupy the same hex, combat is resolved by everyone involved removing one tribe member at a time until there is only a single tribe left – even a single tribe can’t have more than five tribespeople on a hex and will resort to this brutal culling. At the end of your turn, assuming you have resources to do so, you can pay for any objective cards and/or build villages in hexes under your control. If they haven’t been wiped out by the time your next turn arrives, each village scores a point – which might not sound like much, but the game ends instantly the moment any player reaches the holy grail of fifteen points.

But in case you were thinking it all sounds oh-so-simple, there is also a double catch to how the actions are selected. Each of the four actions has a row of three dice on it showing moon symbols, sun symbols, or a blank side. On your turn you roll two extra dice and, in choosing an action, push one of your dice into the chosen row from the left, shoving the right-most die out of the row (which will now become a spare for the next player to roll). If the dice left have a double-moon in the row, your action on this turn will be less effective than the default action. If it has two suns, it’ll be more effective. So what action you choose when isn’t just about what best suits you, but what die faces are showing in the actions themselves and what juicy turns you might be leaving for the player coming after you.

The second catch is that if you roll a double – two suns, moons, or blanks – an Event is triggered. These might be beneficial to you as well, or introduce some extra element to the board, such as a volcano or a woolly mammoth that can be hunted or tamed.

That in a nutshell, is Rise of Tribes – except once you’ve played the basic game you’ll find there’s a heap of extra stuff to add to the mix if you want it, from additional landscape tiles to asymmetrical Tribe abilities. There’s a lot here to explore.