Toda we are going to be look at a game featuring dice as workers in one of my favorite types of game mechanic that is often underdone. The game is Origins: First Builders and plays 1-4 players in approx 1-2 hours.
- Designer: Adam Kwapiński
- Artist: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
- Publisher: Board&Dice
Overview
Origins is played over a number of rounds where players will take turns performing actions until the end of the round where all players have passed. Once all players pass the end game conditions are checked and if triggered the game ends. Otherwise the next round begins the same.
Gameplay
On a player’s turn they have the following actions that make up the bulk of this game. These actions are taken using a die-either one of your Freemen, Archon or Speaker dice and placing it on an encounter site. The encounter sites are where you can find the wheels with the dice values, once you take a die there you need to compare the value to the current value on the wheel. If it is below or equal you take the action. If it is higher than the die value you have to pay 1:1 wisdom to even it out. Once you take the action you roll the encounter site’s dial up one, or if it a six you roll it back to the one.
The actions a player can take are as follows:
Visit an Encounter Site. By doing this with one of your dice or Archon you follow the steps above and choosing an encounter site and dialing up the track by one die value or back to one if it is a six. Here you will take the action based on the color an value of the die used. Here you can Resources and additional Citizen or Speaker dice, advance on the Zodiac Temple tracks or show your strength in battle on the Military track. You can gain resources as depicted on the space or gain a Citizen die to use later. You can also use these spots to purchase a building or a farm as well. You can use them to advance on the Temple track to move your zodiac disk and try to gain the zodiac card for that specific player power. There are also bonus actions you can take if your die matches the color of that bonus.
Close a District. When you build a building or a farm and it closes an area and you place one of your Freemen dice in the middle of it you have closed a district. This is the Seat of Power that it takes and it causes any of the matching building colors that touch it to fire off again. If the District matches one of the cards on display it will yield bonus victory points as well.
Build a Tower Level. When you build these it will look at all the matching colored Seats of Power that have Freeman in them and multiply the number on the die by the amount of discs in the tower. This is a great way to really add up those end-game points.
Grow Your Population. Here you can add a new Population base to pair with a Citizen die. These will allow you to have more Freemen to do work with through selecting one of the Encounter sites.
Pass. When you have made all the moves you would like to for a round you can pass and return all of your workers and spin them up by one.
Play continues round to round until one of the end-game conditions is met. At that time the game ends and the points are all tallied. The player with the most points wins!
What I liked about this game:
I always enjoy a game that highlights dice and although I am often a bigger fan of dice rolling I love the idea of dice placement as a mechanic. Dice Placement is a type of gameplay that some may not be familiar with-basically it’s the idea that the workers act to take actions or moves based on the side of the die. Adding in dice manipulation and evolution allows you to move this around a bit. This game made me think through a lot of purposeful decisions and pathways and I enjoyed the challenge.
Impressions
There are some really fun aspects of this game that make it a recent favorite for me. It has a rhythm to it that is easy to follow when you learn it and hard to really master the choices you need to make. I love the dice placement and rolling up of the dice until they reach that highest level and act to advise your Archon. The dice placement and advancement has a lot of roots in their other titles like Teotihuacan that really focus on that die advancement as it moves around the game board. I can appreciate the nature of that type of play from Teo and love that this calls back to those roots.
The quality of the components and art is solid and well made like most of the Board & Dice Games however there are a few things I need to point out here that could be better. The dials are solid color and lack depth on the pips of the individual die sides on the dial. That makes it very hard to see from across the table. This is easily solved with a sharpie but should have been addressed on the front end. The print on the hex tiles is small and may be difficult to read for older eyes. Lastly the resources for gold, food and wisdom are all around the same color and look too close to distinguish easily. Some different colors on those would be very helpful.
I also enjoy that there are multiple paths to victory here in the game. You can really focus on the Military track or the Temple track or go for the buildings/farms to try and get the best towers and dice placement. Each of these provide ways for you to go for the victory at different angles. We tried it with a general and more each of the more specific pathways in an attempt to win in different ways and they were all competitive. I appreciate that the game gives you those different pathways of winning to explore.
Overall this is a solid medium weight game that most gamers will be able to pick up on in the first play or two. It isn’t overly complicated for no reason but instead provided measured and calculated choices on how and where to place dice and take actions. I think it will be a game that most hobby gamers will jump right into with no difficulty but I would imagine that those with less experience in more challenging decision-making games might find it more complex. But don’t let that deter you if that fits your gaming style, this is a game that with some time spent learning is bound to be a favorite for anyone willing to sit down and learn it. I really enjoyed it and would liken Origins to other games like Teotihuacan or The Artemis Project in dice placement and difficulty level.
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