Hyperborea: High Per Bore EEEE AHHHH

I couldn't come up with a clever title this time that made any sense.  So I went with a non clever one that made no sense.  If you can't beat 'em, run away, I always say.

I played a lot of Magic this weekend.  Like a lot.  But I did find time to squeeze in one of my board games that I haven't gotten to play yet.
This week's game is Hyperborea.  It's a mix of an exploration and simple field battle type game with a cube pushing euro-type backdrop.  Basically, it amounts to a euro game with ameritrash elements, much like Mage Knight (except Mage Knight is much more intricate and a whole lot better, though much much much longer to play). It's a bag building game, a somewhat new idea where you collect cubes or tokens throughout the game that are pulled out of a bag to allow you to take actions.  I hear Oreleans is a much better implementation of the bag building mechanic, and looking at it and reading the rules I would probably agree if I actually got to play it.

But Hyperborea was on sale, and I now own it, and the box has pretty colors.

Green Arrow and his boardgaming buddies.

 Hyperborea is a pretty heavy game.  Not like game-weight/strategy heavy.  Like the box is heavy.

 

I mean, Terra Mystica is a pretty heavy game (both game weight and box weight); it has so much stuff in that box.  But it doesn't even weigh as much.

My bathroom tile floor is green.  I love it.

So back to the game.  Each player starts off on a home tile of a largely unexplored map.

The home city! With Oompa Loompas!

Each player starts off with 3 dudes on the board, more can be added later.  They also start off with one cube of each color in their bag, plus one more cube of a color of their choosing.  Each cube color represents some time of civilization attribute.  Like green is exploration, blue is science, red is military, I don't remember the rest.  These thematic cube (but still just cubes) get pulled out of the bag on each turn (3 per turn), and you place them on your player board.  Once the spaces next to an action are filled with their corresponding colored cubes, you may activate that action.  

Action board

 Actions include things like adding dudes to the board, moving the dudes, attacking with the dudes, getting straight points (gems), advancing your civilization's attributes (to help you get more cubes), building fortresses (which provide a one turn only defense against enemy fighters), or buying technology cards (which behave just like actions on your action board, but score more points and do more stuff).

A military-based technology

Technology cards comes with gray cubes, which can only be used to activate a few choice technologies but are other-wise worthless.  So you get a sweet tech but you have gray cubes gunking up your cube bag and being worthless.  Guess gray cubes are like pollution or something.  #thematic

So you move around the board, fight enemies, and explore ruins and cities (which give you extra actions or sometimes points, but tie up your dudes until you take enough turns to empty your bag of cubes).
Ruins contain ghosts to kill before you get the goodies.  They look scary.

Ghosts.  Maybe Nazgul.

Ghosts/Nazgul fighting Green Arrow.

Ghost/Nazgul is very protective of his precious.

One of the more interesting things about the game is, of course, the bag building mechanic.  You want lots of cubes so you can do a lot of different stuff, but too many cubes and it's hard to draw the colors you need and it takes longer before your bag is empty and you can reset your dudes who are stuck exploring ruins and visiting cities.  Balance is key.

The game ends when a set number of win conditions are met (1 for short game, 2 for medium game, 3 for long game), those conditions being all of one person's miniatures are on the board, one person has 15 gems, or one person gets to own 5 techs.  Those achievements are also worth 2 points each. At the end of the game, you get points for gems, tech cards, enemies killed, ghosts killed, number of cubes in your bag, and spaces in the world your dudes occupy.

We played a medium length game, which felt way too short still but it was only the first game. I went with a heavy "grab the gems" strategy, keeping my cube count low to explore lots of ruins and cities and reset quickly and to make it easier to keep track of what cubes were left in the bag for planning purposes.

ALL THE GEMS!  And Rob Gronkowski?

I lost by a couple of points to an opponent who had a bag full of cubes that hindered him in terms of being productive during the game but was just enough at the end of the game to put him over me.

Overall, I like the game. It's got some fun mechanisms, looks pretty, plays quickly and just feels different.  2 players is probably a bad number, because there's not enough interaction to spice things up.  The rules are also sketchy in several places which is always a problem.
But the game is cool.  I would play again with more people.