My friend Joe is one of the regulars in my gaming group. He, like me, is a confirmed member of the Cult of the New when it comes to games. In mid-December, his gaming order crammed full of Essen titles finally arrived and, to celebrate, he hosted an all-day gaming session at his house on December 26 (known in many parts of the world as Boxing Day). We played three excellent new designs over the course of 11 hours, with occasional breaks for teaching, setup, tear down, and stuffing our faces. I had a great time—it’s one of the best gaming sessions I’ve had in a while. The games we played included some of the hot new titles, so I thought I’d provide you with a session report, featuring details about these new designs. Here they are, in the order we played them.
Civolution
We had an ambitious start to our day of gaming: a 4-player game of the monster title known as Civolution. Those of you who read my Gathering report from last May might remember my disastrous playtest of this Stefan Feld design, despite it being my most anticipated new game at the time. Even though I didn’t enjoy that first play of the prototype at all, I said that I hadn’t given up on the game, but I’d need someone else in my group to pick up the game, to get the necessary buy-in and ensure it would get to the table. Well, bless his heart, Joe turned out to be that guy, so I got a second crack at this opus.
I suspected one of the reasons my first experience with Civolution went so poorly was that it was a cold teach. I tend not to do well with that, particularly with games as massively detailed as this one. Thankfully, this time around, I was able to go through the rules thoroughly prior to play. And I was greatly assisted by what has to be one of the best rulebooks I’ve read in the past 5 years (and probably longer than that). With substandard rules becoming the norm, it was such a pleasure to read rules which are so clearly, carefully, and cleverly laid out. Honestly, it’s a model rulebook—and it needs to be, due to the scope of the game. Great job by Deep Print, the game’s publisher, with the effort led by one of the world’s best developers, Viktor Kobilke. (And kudos to Deep Print for putting Kobilke’s name on the front cover. It’s about time that game developers get the recognition they deserve!)
The theme of Civolution is that we’re young deities training to lead tribes of mortals. The game represents our final exam. We are each given our own group to guide, and we have to help them populate the land, feed them, help them to build, oversee their evolution, and so forth. The deity who does the best job of this (i.e., earns the most VPs) passes the course and goes on to bigger and better godly things.
Mechanically, it’s a bit like a two-dimensional version of Feld’s wonderful Castles of Burgundy. You have a bunch of dice you roll (6 dice at the start and you can get more). On your turn, you take 2 of your dice and use the values to select an action. The order doesn’t matter, so if the dice have different values, there are 15 possible combinations, meaning there are 15 different actions you can do. You can use doubles to acquire features for your tribe–these are attributes like Intelligence and Expressiveness that are useful for playing cards into your display. Finally, any two dice can be used to Sleep, which gives you Idea chips that let you modify your dice. So that’s twenty-two different actions! Oh, and each of the 15 actions from the first group can be upgraded twice. Add it all up, that’s over fifty different things you can do with a pair of dice!!! Yeah, it’s bonkers.
If you run out of dice or you don’t like the ones you have, you can reset and reroll your dice. After a certain number of resets, the Era ends and there’s some bookkeeping and VPs to be earned. The game lasts 4 eras, followed by a final scoring.
What are some of the things you can do with those actions? There’s a map (with a different, randomly determined setup for each game) where your dudes can roam. You can procreate to get more dudes, migrate to move them around, use them to explore territories, and have them produce resources. (There are 6 terrain types and each has 3 types of resources associated with it–that’s right, there’s eighteen different resources! Like I said, bonkers.) You can hunt to get food, build structures, and transport or trade goods. There are different types of cards you can play in your display which give you abilities or let you score VPs. There’s a massive amount of stuff you can do.
It sounds like it should be overwhelming and that’s exactly what it felt like in my first game. But with proper preparation, it all hangs together extremely well. In fact, everyone in our session loved our game! The highlight is the central dice mechanic, which is really interesting. There’s lots of ways of adjusting your dice, but to some extent, you should try to work with what the dice gods give you as much as possible. Fortunately, there are usually useful things you can do and the many paths you can follow add to the game’s appeal.
Our game lasted a good 5 hours, but it never dragged and was one of those games where you look at your watch and are surprised you’ve been playing that long. I suspect that if all the players have just a bit of experience that the play time will come down to 1 hour per player and maybe even a bit less. 3 players is probably the game’s sweet spot, so we’re talking about a 3 hour game, which is a quite reasonable duration for my group.
It’s very much a sandbox game, but it provides a great and very varied sandbox to play in. There’s not a huge amount of interaction, but there are some spots on the board you want to get to first. Mostly, it’s just a fun game to explore and the replayability seems to be through the roof. I’m just thrilled that I was able to give it a second chance, as it’s gone from a game that I didn’t think was at all for me to a leading contender for my game of the year. A perfect example of not letting a bad first impression be the last one!
In our game, it was interesting that the player who had the least opportunity to review the rules ahead of time recovered from a bad start and wound up winning! So that shows that, despite the number of options, it’s possible to learn this game on the fly and do well.
I obviously want to get this to the table again soon, although scheduling games of this complexity is sometimes a challenge. But more plays will give me a better idea of how this fits in my Feld rankings. Feld is one of my favorite designers, with half a dozen titles I love, but the last one of these was Bora Bora, which was released in 2013. Civolution is easily his heaviest and most ambitious title and, with the assistance of a world-class developer like Kobilke, it’s great to see that he could pull it off. Could this wind up being my favorite Feld, displacing the game that has long been in the top spot, Castles of Burgundy? I can’t wait to find out!
Fromage
Our second game was Fromage. The theme is we’re all French cheesemakers trying to make the best artisanal cheeses by buying quality ingredients and properly aging our cheeses. Joe set some nice cheeses out for snacking to get us in the mood! The designers are Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset, a veteran team also responsible for The Search for Planet X and Between Two Cities.
Fromage is a very clever game that uses simultaneous worker placement. Other games that have attempted this rely on timed moves (sometimes with sand timers as the workers), but Fromage’s approach is unique. The board sits on kind of a Lazy Susan and can be rotated. It’s divided into 4 quadrants (sort of inspired by the 4 quarters of a wheel of cheese) and on your turn, you can only place your workers in the quadrant nearest to you. You can place one worker to gather resources (a different type for each quadrant) and one worker to make cheese (these are good for end-game VPs, with different scoring rules for each quadrant). The board is then rotated 90 degrees and on the next turn, each player then plays on their new quadrant. Before you do that, you check to see which workers are facing you following the rotation. The different worker spaces have different orientations so that the workers have varying facings as you place them. The way it works, the least powerful actions let your workers come back to you on your next turn, while the middling and most powerful actions require you to wait for 2 and 3 rotations, respectively. It’s very slick and lets the timing of the returning workers be an automatic process. Thematically, it also simulates the aging of the cheeses, which is nice. It’s a little unfortunate that some of the player colors are the same as some of the cheese colors; normally, that wouldn’t bother me at all, but here, it led to us occasionally grabbing the wrong workers, which necessitated a few rewinds to straighten things out. Additionally, the Lazy Susan was a bit wobblier than we would have liked. But I do love the central concept and the other issues aren’t major ones.
Since everyone works on a separate area each turn, this isn’t a standard worker placement game where you have to worry about opponents grabbing your spots. But the other players do get in your way with their placements on previous turns—either temporary ones for resources or permanent ones when they grab cheese spaces. And each of your three workers is associated with a different type of cheese, which limits which spaces they can be placed on. So all that should enter into your planning, along with getting the timing down of when your workers come back to you, making the game more challenging then it first appears.
In fact, even though I’d call this a middleweight game, it’s definitely a bit thinky and good planning is vital. This is a nice surprise, given that it isn’t rules heavy at all. And since everyone is playing simultaneously, the game moves along quite quickly. It’s a very attractive combination.
I really like Fromage. It’s easy to teach and only takes about 45-60 minutes to play, but it provides a nice challenge and seems to have good depth. The theme is an attractive one and it has a unique feel. It’s not a cheesy game at all, but one I can definitely recommend with a chef’s kiss.
Galileo Galilei
Our final Boxing Day game was our first foray (but not, by any means, the last) into the designs of the hobby’s latest shooting star, Tomas Holek. In a way that happens surprisingly often, Holek has gone from being a total unknown to releasing no fewer than 3 of his games at Essen: SETI, Tea Garden, and Galileo Galilei. Joe has already picked up SETI and I’m looking forward to getting that on the table, but first we go back to an earlier stargazer, the brilliant Galileo. In this game, we’re peers of ol’ Double G during the Renaissance, trying to make our reputations with our observations of the heavenly bodies. Of course, the Church at that time viewed many of these discoveries as heretical, particularly those that seemed to deny the doctrine that the Sun revolved around the Earth. So many of those observations will come attached with an Inquisitor determined to report on your lack of faith. Fortunately, you might be able to convince those snooping busybodies that you’re not such a bad guy after all…
Galileo is an action selection game in which you try to make astronomical discoveries while dealing with those pesky Inquisitors. The action selector (and principal gimmick) for each player is a telescope that acts as your own personal rondel. On your turn, you raise your telescope to point higher in the night sky by 1-3 spaces. You then carry out the actions it winds up pointing to. This always consists of two sets of action tiles: one set that is fixed in position and another set which moves every turn in a predictable fashion. This in itself is a cool feature that lets you do some interesting planning.
The principal goal is observing constellations and major objects (like planets and such). In order to do this, you must gather, convert, and increment dice of the three primary colors of blue, red, and yellow. Constellations require dice of the same color which total up to a certain value, while the more valuable major objects require dice of two different colors (which combine in the standard way to make green, orange, and purple requirements). So you need to obtain these dice (there’s a limit to how many you can have, of course) and increase their values to let you make the observations. Different action tiles let you take dice, increment their values, and then use them to make the observations listed on cards laid out in the display. One of the tiles also lets you upgrade the movable tiles, so you can flip one of them to give you more powerful actions to choose from.
The observations you’ll be making give you VPs, but many of them also give you an Inquisitor to worry about. Left alone to fester, these inquisitors can cost you massive amounts of VPs. However, you can persuade them (through a game action) that you’re still loyal to the Church and if you do this well enough, they won’t cost you quite so much and might even wind up helping you out! This is not easy and you might lose some VPs along the way, but whoever can best balance the observations and managing the Inquisitors will earn the most points and win.
In our game, some of the players avoided the Inquisitors altogether, while other players scored more base VPs from their discoveries, but took a hit from their holy buddies. However, we were playing with the Advanced rules, in which each of us was assigned a character with some special powers. One of my character’s abilities allowed me to do a “super” persuade action once during the game and I used this, together with a good deal of planning, to get my Inquisitors to where they actually gave me positive VPs, while my fellow players were losing points. That was enough to give me the win (clearly, I expected the Spanish Inquisition!).
I tend to be fond of games that use rondels and Galileo’s version, with its variable action tile pairings, is one of the more interesting I’ve encountered. There’s all sorts of lookahead you could employ by arranging to get the movable action tiles where you need them to be. I’m sure that experienced players will take advantage of this; to be honest, I didn’t go nearly that far, but even planning two or three turns ahead gave me a satisfying and successful game. I also didn’t upgrade many of my tiles; that’s another thing that you could really take advantage of. So there’s the potential for a lot of game here, but you can also just have fun without doing an extreme amount of planning, which is a nice parlay.
One of the potential issues with the game is the inclusion of the Inquisitors, who can really trash your score if you’re not careful. When I was discussing the game with the other OGers who had played it, a few of them really didn’t care for them. I’m on the other side of the argument. I guess that’s not too surprising, as I tend to like unforgiving games. Managing the Inquisitors also gives the game another element to consider and that’s usually something I like to see in games. For example, the many ways you can score points in Agricola are interesting, but what makes it a great game is that you have to feed your people. That extra element, which is always in the back of your mind, gives the game the extra challenge that I, and so many of the games other fans, love. I’m not saying Galileo is as good a game as Rosenberg’s masterpiece, but I’m just using it to show what I like to see in games. Yes, the Inquisitors are tough to deal with, but they can be managed and might even wind up helping you, which is unusual for a game’s bogeyman. I think they make the game better, but not everyone will agree.
I also got to play the prototype for SETI at the Gathering and really liked it. So Holek is a designer I will definitely be paying attention to in the future. He’s obviously off to a great start, thanks to his Essen explosion.
Overall, it was a terrific game session. Joe was the perfect host, particularly since he provided us with such great games to play. I’m hoping to get all of these games back to the table soon, even while there are other shiny new acquisitions that will compete for our gaming time. I’m particularly looking forward to playing Civolution again, although getting to play a game of that length can be a challenge. But no worries—I’m still feeling that gaming high. All-day gaming on Boxing Day: now that’s a great Christmas present!
Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers
Civolution
Alison Brennan: The latest gaming love of my life. The scoring criteria change just enough each game to change the value of the various 22, yes, 22 actions (most of which can be upgraded twice). As does your choice of starting cards from those available. The challenge is rolling with the fates thrown at you by the dice gods and seeing how closely you can navigate your strategic path; and the decisions to be made when alternate paths are required. I love how you can make some games all about the map, others all about the cards, or finding the right blend to make the best of the card effects you draw into. Even after a bunch of plays there’s still so much left to explore.
Alan How: This was my favourite game from 2024. The range of choices and in which sequence you select them provide a fascinating set of decisions. I also really like the variety in the game, so you never can tell what party you follow each game. I’ve played this at 1,2 and 3 player counts and I’m most satisfied with the 2 and 3 player games because I like the degree of interaction on the map. Solo is also surprisingly enjoyable as the non human turns are very quick to complete and many of the decisions in the multiplayer game translate well to the solo game.
Does it need any expansions? Of course not, but with its popularity there may be some arise in the future.
Fromage
Alison Brennan: Each of the 4 boards has a different scoring conceit and a different set of resources to gather, and each round the boards rotate between the players. You need to quickly ascertain your strategy re which board(s) you wish to concentrate your scoring, and on which to gather resources, and this influences which meeples to use and how powerful each action will be (because actions can lock your meeples for up to 3 turns). You also want to work towards getting extra actions for use on your chosen boards. It’s all quite clever and I enjoyed exploring. NB: It’s better f2f than on BGA.
Alan How: I’ve played this several times face to face and on BGA. I much prefer 4 player versions because it feels more competitive even though in smaller player counts the options are reduced. I’m not sure that it’s better f2f than on BGA; BGA does highlight the possible options, but f2f you get the touchy feelyness of gaming on a real board. Overall I’ve enjoyed my games (about 7 so far), but I’m not raving about it. It’s clever, works well and presents some interesting ideas in a short amount of time.
Galileo Galilei
Alison Brennan: It’s on the radar …
Ratings from other Opinionated Gamers
Civolution
- I love it! Larry, Lorna, Alan, Simon Weinberg, Alison
- I like it. Steph, Ryan Post
- Neutral. Craig Massey, Simon Neale, Ben Bruckart
- Not for me. Doug Garrett
Fromage
- I love it!
- I like it. Larry, Alison, Alan
- Neutral.
- Not for me.
Galileo Galilei
- I love it! Doug Garrett
- I like it. Larry, Dale Yu, John Palagyi, Mark Jackson, Ryan Post
- Neutral. Dan Blum, Nate Beeler
- Not for me. Joe Huber, Jonas Francis
