Golden Egg Games Historia Board Game

I've been eyeing Historia for a while. I've wanted to add a civilization style game to my collection and narrowed it down to Historia and Nations. I decided on Historia because I read that it played better solo, and just in case my wife didn't like it I wanted a good solo game. Well, we just got done with our first game and we both enjoyed it. My wife was a little worried with all the iconography used in the game, becoming a little intimidated looking at it from the start, but it was easy to pick up on and remember by the time we were done.As far as the component quality, the board is well made and laid out in an easy to understand way. The components other than cards are just painted wooden cubes like most euro games. Only issue I have was that some of the cards are already showing some wear on the sides after just one play through.As far as the game play, it is definitely abstracted. I am really big on theme for games but I also enjoy lighter themed games like Puerto Rico. I wouldn't say this game has a ton of theme but by including real historical people, wonders, and events it helps bring the theme out more. The meat of the game is working out what actions to play and trying to do them optimally. Since there are so many actions you can do, we didn't feel any sort of repetition throughout the game, and never felt bored. The game stayed close up until the last era but I think as we play more the games will be more competitive.Overall, I would say that if you like euro games like Puerto Rico and are wanting to try out a light civilization game, then you will like Historia.

I've only played this solo so far. While I do enjoy the game, it certainly won't scratch an itch for a complex tech tree-wielding civ junkie. This has a very cool grid mechanic for tracking your civ's capabilities, and the AI isn't bad - it's certainly trickier than plenty others I've played against.Basically, pick it up if you like civ as a theme and want a quick, streamlined game. If you're looking for complexity, head elsewhere, like FFG's Sid Meier adaptation, which is excellent.

Everything as should be. No fuss no muss. Very smooth A - O.K. Very pleased

Easy set up. Easy to follow rules. Great fun to play solo. A lot of replay value. Recommended.

One of my favorite board games. I've played over 300. Tzolk'in is another.

I've just starting playing it and can't wait to use it in my classroom

If I were to use two words to describe this game to people it would be "spreadsheet civilization". Which is a shame because those two words are going to immediately put a lot of people off because for some that sounds really dull.In this game every player starts with the same set of action cards and number of cubes. These cubes represent the sum of all your abstracted ability and resources. Each player also has their own personal advisor deck that they get to draw cards from at certain technology thresholds and provide one-time improved actions as well as a leader card which represents goals that will give bonus points at the end of that age.The game is played via simultaneous action selection. Each player selects a card from their hand of unused ones and plays it to the table, when all have played they are revealed simultaneously and resolved in turn order. Most of these cards require cubes (those universal resources) to resolve going to a used pool. This is where the civilization matrix comes in and why I call it a spreadsheet civilization game. The majority of the board is taken up by this large 16x16 grid (with some gaps along the edges). The X-axis represents the technology level of your civilization and the Y-axis represents the military level. Two of your cards increase you along these axis', when you get to certain levels on the technology track you can play more cards each turn, get new advisors, and used improved versions of your action cards. Increasing in military allows you the ability to raid and go to war with neighbors on the small world map giving you points and claiming new territory for yourself.There are also action cards that buy you new wonders for once-per-round bonuses, retrieve used cubes, and the most interesting one the Revolution card. When one or more players play a Revolution card the round will end after everyone takes their turn. Normally you only get your two oldest cards back, this card management makes for a lot of really interesting decisions in the game as you want to do actions in particular order, especially for things that are limited like the wonders, but also want to set yourself up with the proper cards the following turn. The Revolution card however also reclaims itself and one other card of your choice. So playing this card is almost like a game of chicken because having back any of your cards that you like is a very powerful ability.I really enjoyed this game. The mechanics managed to abstract the building of a civilization with the universal power cubes and civilization matrix while still keeping everything feeling reasonably thematic and not dry. There are a TON of decisions to make at every point in the game with all you have the ability to do and there is a decent amount of interaction without being too mean. You can raid a neighbor for points but it doesn't hurt them at all and even if you go to war, you can remove a cube of theirs from the map, but you can't remove the last one so there is no player elimination.There are a few problems with the game as well though. First of all, the rulebook is not very good and we had a lot of issues with poorly described rules. The main one being that nowhere did it tell us which symbol Navigation was. All of the technology levels are depicted with symbols. A lot of them are self-explanatory and most of them don't matter because what you get at that level is also depicted with symbols (described on a player reference sheet) underneath. However one rule is that when you hit the technology level for Navigation all spaces on the world map are considered adjacent for actions. Well, nowhere does it say Navigation on the board and the symbol is not shown in the rulebook where this rule is mentioned. Looking at the board technology level 11 is a compass...that must be navigation right? Compasses are used by navigators to chart and measure voyages. No, Navigation was level 8, the picture of the boat. So a large portion of the game was hurt by players not being able to cross the map until 3 technology levels later than normal. This was especially hard for the player who started in the western hemisphere when the other 3 started in the connected other 4 continents.That isn't it either, everything is depicted with symbols in this game and many of them or specific rules interactions are not properly defined or described so we had to use our best judgement for a lot of it and after our Navigation example, we have no way of knowing if our best judgement was correct. I also think the board could have done with being about 25% bigger, especially the world map section. Everything was very small and hard to see or read, especially managing cubes for 4 players on a really tiny map once people started to expand and needed to see which areas shared a border. I also get that they were going for this particular style but the dingy colors of everything really don't grab me in games. They want it to look stylishly old but I think they just look...bad old.However the game is good enough to get over and look past these quibbles. There are even in-the-box ways to mix up the game a little bit with expert drafting rules for setup and an event card variant that has nasty events show up throughout the game. Very good product.

Great strategy game. A civ game that can be played in an hour. I loved Sid Myers old game but this gives me that same feel in less than half the time. Really fun.