A few days ago, my air conditioning went out. So I did the only logical thing: turned on a fan, cracked a window, and played a solo boardgame. Follow the logic. It's there.
This time around, it was Nations. Nations is a civilization building game, much like
Through the Ages. The concept and theme of these two games is basically the same, but Nations is quite a bit less complicated (admittedly not quite as fun, but easier to teach and play quickly).
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| When time periods collide. Abe Lincoln's face is that of a man who is judging you. |
A bonus to Nations, though, is it comes with a Solo Variant. Even better, it comes with specific pieces that are used solely for the solo game and not the multi player game. So the solo variant is not just a random add on for kicks, it was actually planned out. Kudos to Abe Lincoln and friends.
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| Solo game special tile and a die!! |
The solo variant replaces event cards, which make randomizes things a bit in each round of the multiplayer game, with event tiles (which are chunkier) which determine what the imaginary friend fake faceless opponent gets each round. It also tells you how bad the famine is this round that takes your wheat away, how many architects are available for constructing Wonders, and stuff that happens on certain dice rolls.
The imaginary friend fake faceless opponent rules the die every time it is his/her's turn and stuff happens.
As you may recall, I don't like playing solo games against imaginary friend fake faceless opponents. Mozzie was kind enough to stand in again and help me out.
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| Mozzie calls this his "Warmongering hat". And his "juice bottle." |
Mozzie, as always, likes hats and drinking. That's why we get along.
The game lets you select a difficulty level that determines how many resources you can obtain during a maintenance. I chose the easiest difficulty.
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| Chieftain/Easy Mode is still really hard. |
The whole game setup looks like this.
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| Game start |
There a personal player board, that determines your starting buildings and resources and is where you will build later buildings, military units, colonies, wonders, and store your leader/advisor.
Then there's a card drafting board, where new cards come out each round, and get stronger over the 4 ages (each with 2 rounds) of the game. You buy cards with gold (1, 2 or 3 depending the row the card is in). Some cards are buildings/leaders/wonders/military while others just give you stuff.
In the solo rules, there are 4 columns of cards, and whenever Mozzie rules a 1-4 that numbered column gets taken away, so you want to prioritize card buying before he steals the good ones.
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| Quite the selection. |
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| Mozzie stole 2 columns already. |
Finally there's a main board, which keeps track of military strength, nation stability, player order, round number, and score.
Leaders and manned buildings produce stuff each round. Buildings are manned and military units are produce by taking free workers and paying stones. Some military units require wheat to be fed each round, in addition to famine costs. You can produce more workers at the start of a turn, but at a price of paying extra wheat every round or losing nation stability.
Your manned buildings, wonders, and colonies score points at the end of the game. You also earn (or lose) points throughout the game through various cards, having more stability than Mozzie (+/- 1 point per round), or having more books than Mozzie (+3 per age).
I invested heavily in staying ahead on books and stability to accumulate points during play.
I also had a pretty strong military, which is required to take over colonies, but got there too late to buy more than 1.
Endgame score looked like this.
There is no winning or losing. You just get a rank based on how many points you get.
Apparently I am at "Pericles" rank with my score. I have some work to do...this game is hard.
I like this a whole lot as a solo game. Multiplayer is ok, though it falls short of Through the Ages in terms of the complexity that I like (though wins in taking half as long). But this is my go-to solo game for lonely nights when the air conditioning is broken (it totally makes sense in my mind still). I highly recommend it for that purpose, especially if you like civ games.
My game table was kinda a mess after the game. Mozzie was also a mess.
