The game is fairly simple at its core. You have a main meeple (Steward) that you move on a hex grid of tiles. To every tile you move to, you do what the tile says which is gathering resources or spending them for buildings on your tableau for the most part. You have 3 moves per turn, that is basically the core of it.
Rules in a nutshell:- The game takes place over 4 eras, each 5 years long, each 2 half-years, each taking each player 3 moves on a hex grid of tiles, making this 120 moves per player.
- Each Hex Tile triggers an action. The actions are mostly
-- either gathering the resources
-- or refining the resources (wood into planks, clay into bricks, ore into bars)
-- or spending the resources for a building that you add to your tableau. Sometimes you also
-- sell resources for money (=VP)
-- get cards
-- play cards
3 more key rules:1.) Moving: You can either move to an adjacent tile (you can only go to a tile if you can fulfill the action) or jump to a Market of your choice. You can't end after 3 moves on the same spot you started. If you enter a space of an opponent you have to pay him a fee (exception: Markets).
2.) Paying resources: You need to have the full cost in your storage available. Additional resources in warehouses or production building buffers (which can store one year worth of production) aren't available to you. But you can swap the content of storage and warehouse, move buffer resources to your storage or get rid of resources before any action.
3.) Workers: Almost every building needs to be run by a worker. There are 3 tiers: Farmer (green), Citizen (yellow), Merchant (red) and the icon of the building shows by which kind of worker and how many it needs to be run. Each year and when you man a building you have to pay food and/or clothes depending on the tier of the worker.
Other than that you just follow the order of events. Every year there is sustenance and production, additional tiles get added to the grid. Every era the card piles get swapped. Moves are fairly straightforward in my experience quite often (most of the 120 turns are quite obvious), difficulty comes mainly into play through the random 4 out of 8 colony buildings that are in the game which drastically change your game powers and deciding for the correct colonies is quite important. Not sure why Watno's group's experience was so long, I have only played Singleplayer though so far. Box basically says 4h for the full game. First game of course takes longer. Rules:
http://mayfairgames.com/files/supportfiles/thecolonists_rules_en_v7.pdfSignups:- Jack Rudd
- ghostofmars
- Watno
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Topic: Colonists (Game End, Watno won) (Read 42088 times)