While still slowly making my way back to the Bubble in Elite Dangerous, I’ve been getting to know this little digital boardgame. I heard about this on Broken Forum and the simple premise and basic graphics reminded me of Euro boardgames. Unfortunately while it take a bit of effort to learn the game, there isn’t really all that much to the gameplay and one soon tires of it.

This game has you developing a small settlement. Each point of population gives you one six-sided die and the face rolled determines what role you can deploy them as. They can construct buildings, work on tiles, gather resources and breed. Deploying costs food, which you can obtain by working farms and hunting animals. In addition, each turn you draw three cards which can be played on its own for a small effect or combined with a die for a more powerful effect. A match consists of three phases and you need to score a certain number of Victory Points by a specific turn limit to move on to the next phase. The tasks that you must do to earn VPs are randomized each game and changes each phase.

To make your life harder, barbarian settlements will occasionally spawn enemies who will wreck your buildings and in fact anything else they encounter on the map. Moving from one phase to the next also causes a random effect that is determined at the start of the game. At low difficulty levels this effect is beneficial, such as having new trees appear on the map. At higher difficulties, they can be disastrous such as making you lose all of your stored food or clearing out all water tiles on the map. This means that you must be aware of what will happen when you score enough VPs to transition to the next phase and plan accordingly.

The design is clever enough. You clearly want to maximize efficiency with the die results and the cards you draw and it can be immensely frustrating when you’re out of food and don’t roll a single Gather face. The barbarians exert pressure to rush for the Church, in order to turn workers into Crusaders who can destroy their settlements. But in order to meet the tight VP requirements you might have to fend them off inefficiently with ordinary workers to build other stuff. Buildings turn worker dice into other types like hunters and masons. They can also add new, drastically more powerful cards to your deck. So there’s some room to explore advanced strategies.

Still the hardest part of each match is the early game when you have few workers and hence few options and barbarians are very intimidating. The later phases are much easier provided you can manage the phase transitions properly. I dislike how the tasks for VPs seem completely random, so in the early phase you may be asked to make two masons or something which is more appropriate for the mid to late game. The combination of VPs requirements and transition effects may well make some games unwinnable. The rush for VPs also encourage you to build in silly ways, such as spamming bridges which go nowhere. This is definitely not the kind of game in which you can leisurely build up your settlement. All your actions must be optimized towards getting VPs.

Each match is pretty short and it’s fun to explore the different options from the advanced buildings. Still there’s only so far that you can such a simple system and once you understand the various combinations (hint: the marketplace card is crazy strong), you’ll get bored of the game soon enough. I do recommend it however as it’s small and cheap and good while it lasts.