This will be a short review after first two plays with 4 players. In these reviews I do not go into details about the rules and concentrate more on the general feel and the flow of the game.
I am a Kickstarter backer of this game. I've been following the updates and the images the whole time, so my expectations were quite high from the start.
COMPONENTS
This is a strong aspect of games by <PERSON> (Red Raven Games). The art on the cards as well as the board itself is really colourful and beautiful. After unboxing the game I was really impressed by the amount and quality of the artwork done for this game. The only small issue - there's no round marker. A coin should be used for that. Not such a big problem, I will find some wooden component for that in my 'extra' stuff boxes.
Solid
THEME, GAMEPLAY and FEELS LIKE
This is a city building game where you build buildings, provide new districts (so you can add more buildings), recruit military cards to overcome vicious titans terrorizing peoples of the ancient world. The basic mechanic is worker placement with workers having different numbers on them (1 to 5) representing the skill of the worker. There are several rules for worker placement. The main way to gain victory points is to collect banners of the tribes who joins your city-state after building buildings and defeating titans. So the banners are present on each building and titan card. There's no direct conflict between players except some tension related to who get's the building card first, attack the titan first or places a specific worker on an action space. It is generally a friendly game.
In my opinion, the theme is well reflected and supported by the mechanics in the game. You can feel your city-state growing, with more options available to you as the game progresses. I decided to separate several aspects of the game which I either enjoyed or disliked a bit. Here it goes.
There are many games where you build your engine buy purchasing cards. Here, however, you should look at two things - the function of the card as well as the colour of the banner it provides for you. The more banners of the same colour you will have at the end of the game, the more points you will get. Finding the right balance between functions for your engine to get running smoothly and set collection for victory points is well implemented.
Skill level of the worker you place may be crucial and interesting some times, yet sometimes, only the number of workers you have is that really matters. You can block some actions for other players by placing your high-skill worker. But in most cases, there's a way around it or there's just enough options of some other useful actions for other players. Basically, when you get new worker, you get the higher skill worker immediately. 366
Maybe (just maybe) another action could have been present - raising the skill level of your workers. This way, you could in theory go for either better skill of your workers, or try to capitalize on quantity of the workers. Not sure about this. So I have mixed feelings concerning this aspect of the game.
Titans. This reminded me a bit of Thunderstone. If you are the only player who can defeat the titan which is on top of the particular stack, you can delay this action and see other people waiting for it to be defeated and the new one to be revealed. However, the attack action itself is a bit bland. You just need to collect the number of swords/arrows and it's done. You roll for the casualties which in most cases damages your buildings. In most cases, you are just ready to damage your buildings and there's not so much excitement here. Your army never suffers from the attack, just your buildings. I wonder if this aspect of the game could have been a bit more complex. How about different damage that the specific titan can do, e.g. paralyze your worker, destroy your army, affect the actions on the board? How about special weapons or heroes who could have reroll abilities or hiring armies of other players? I would like a bit more spice in here.
Nevertheless, the interesting part of fighting the titans is the legacy abilities of your armies / hiring / retiring. This is nice and smooth.
Banner scoring. you basically just collect banners to score VP's and that's it. There's one card in the game which gives you 1 VP for the set of unique banners, but it's quite underpowered. If you are going for red banners, you should do it till the end. Also mixed feelings here. I think I would prefer building some kind of unique banner patterns. The simpliest way to do it, is to use systems of the 7 Wonders. You have increasing VP's for unique banners but also some amount of VP's for the full set of five. How about special armies or heroes which become availabe for you if you collect the support of specific tribes. 528