The towering vines and natural beauty around you lead to and reveal a path that you have never seen. Moving slowly through the vines and the thorns you discover a garden laying just below the greenery. The garden blooms with vivid colors marking the tiles that move through land. Look closely and see what the flowers behold-a peak into the unknown…
Umbra Via is designed by Conner Wake with art by Eddie Schillo and Stevo Torres. It is published by Pandasaurus Games. It plays 2-4 players.
Overview
In Umbra Via players compete to control and complete paths. Bidding in secret players try to control a placement of a path and then attempt to control that path. Umbra Via mixing blind bidding, area control and route-building all together as you attempt to reign supreme.
Gameplay
Each player begins with the bidding board, player screen, bag and flowers of their color. The main board is placed in the middle of the play area and the path tiles are shuffled and placed near the board. The soul tiles will hold 11 of the players soul flowers and the rest along with the energy flowers are placed in the bag for that player.
Each round players will begin with drawing path tiles, bidding and forming paths with those tiles on the main board. Completed paths earn players soul flowers. The first player to claim all of their soul flowers along with their soul tile win!
Each round is made up of three phases, and we will look at what they entail here. The game is played over a series of these rounds until someone triggers the end-game condition to win. The phases are:
1. Round Setup
2. Bidding
3. Placement
In Round Setup players reveal 4 path tiles from the stack and place them on the altar board. They are placed exactly as drawn with no rotation or movement.
Phase two is the Bidding phase where players will participate in a secret bidding auction to decide who places these tiles. There are two rounds of bidding, each time players will draw 3 flowers from their bag and pick where they are going to place them. After the first bid is resolved and revealed it allows players to see where others may be going for the second bid. Energy flowers are worth 1 and soul flowers are worth two points towards determining winners of each tile.
And finally in the third phase Placement occurs where winners are found based on the flower count for each tile. They are placed in order of least to most total flowers on the individual tiles. The player with the highest bid will place the tile. First remove all soul tiles and discard them from the game while leaving the energy flowers on the tile. These can continue or start a path.
If you complete a path it is time to do a Summoning. This will cause you to rank the players on the path and they will each gain soul flowers from their soul flower equal to the number of tiles in the path for first and then rounded down for each place down in order. All of the flowers gained and on the tile go into the players’ bags.
This continues each round until a player is the first to claim their soul tile. This is worth two soul flowers and will only be claimed if you are first in a path and it is at least two tiles long.
Impressions
Umbra Via is a beautiful game on the table and one that I have really enjoyed exploring. I enjoy blind bidding games but find that there are not a lot of them out there in the general gaming world that I have played with some variety of other mechanics in them. The two part bidding turns give you enough information to make a decision for the next round but also you can fake others out and make other decisions that affect the game in a way to confuse what you’re actually thinking or planning to do.
The game is designed and illustrated well with the graphics and other components in the box. You really get a feel for the paths and natural design that the game is trying to do. Pandasaurus did a great job on the presentation here in the game and their passion in getting this done well really shows.
This game is perfect for anyone who loves an abstract experience on the table and wants a game that gives depth without sacrificing long amounts of time. It sits well in that Azul/Calico type of game when it comes to puzzling the tile laying out but also adds a unique bidding aspect similar to a game like Revolution! that gives that blind play against other players experience. Newer players or inexperienced players young or old will be abkle to pick up on this after a few plays as well.
Overall I would recommend this game as well worth checking out for all players new and experienced alike. It is a beautiful game on the table and plays very smooth at multiple player counts. I look forward to getting a few more plays of this one in soon with friends and family!
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