Tag: board games

SubscribeStar Saturday: Prehistoric Exploration: Catan: Dawn of Humankind

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Last night yours portly had his raucous bachelor party, which consisted of eating pizza and play board games with my friends at my younger brother’s house.  The board gaming highlight of the evening was playing Catan: Dawn of Humankind (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you), which my best man purchased as an early wedding gift.

The game can best be described as a blend of the early turns of any Civilization game and Settlers of Catan (more affiliate links), the classic Klaus Teuber game.  The map takes place on Earth, with all players starting with camps and explorers (imagine a blend of the scout and settler in Civ) in Africa.  Players are encouraged via various game mechanics to migrate out of Africa and to explore and populate the rest of the world.

Like classic Catan, the goal is to reach ten victory points.  These points achieved through various means—cultural and scientific development; exploration; and settlement outside of Africa.  Like Catan, players gather four different resources, re-themed to fit the prehistoric setting, by rolling two six-sided dice.  Players may trade these resources or cash triplicates into the bank in exchange for a single resource of another type.

There are some key differences, however:  while Dawn of Humankind is built on the Catan system, it is geared towards exploration and research.  Settlement is a key component of the game, but it’s done by sending out explorers.  Some areas of the map are blocked off by certain research requirements; for example, reaching Australia requires substantial investments into construction (for boats, presumably) and clothing.  Going towards the Arctic requires high clothing investments.  Investing in exploration lets explorers move more quickly, and investing in hunting allows players to move the Neanderthal in Eurasia and the Smilodon (saber-toothed tiger) in the Americas and Australia (these tokens act as the equivalent to the thief in classic Catan.

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TBT^2: SimEarth

The Portly Politico4 Comments

The school year is grinding down at an agonizingly slow pace, which means my mind increasingly is turning away from serious matters and towards video games.

As a grown man with too many responsibilities and not enough time, I don’t indulge in video games much anymore.  I’ve always been more of a casual gamer in the sense that I play in short spurts for fun of it, not necessarily “beating” (finishing) a game, but enjoying playing with its mechanics or discovering some bit of its story.  I play games that would be considered “serious” among gamers, but I don’t do so with the intensity of those more committed gamers.

Increasingly, though, my gaming habits have turned towards more casual games—puzzle games and the like.  I don’t do a ton of gaming on my phone, but there are a few that I enjoy.

One of those is TerraGenesis, a game in which you take on the terraforming of a planet.  The game starts you with Mars, and by the time you read this post, I should have completed my first successful terraforming of the red planet.  The game draws heavily from the style of the board game Terraforming Mars, which is one of my favorites in the “make-this-planet-habitable-for-humans” genre.

Playing that got me thinking about the granddaddy of all terraforming games, SimEarth.  I wrote a loving tribute to this DOS classic a few years ago, and it seemed like a good time to give it another look.

With that, here is “TBT: SimEarth“:

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