Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Man, I just love a civilization game. For a power-tripping megalomaniac like myself, there’s just nothing better than taking the helm of a conglomerate of violent individuals and making bad decisions.
Near: Echoes of Civilizations has a goofy name—you really have to do some mental gymnastics for it to make sense at all. But, there’s some real fun to be had here. All the hits are here: Technology! Combat! Resource management! Points!
Actually, part of what makes Near interesting is its commitment to synthesizing the heads-down-euro-bean-counter that constitutes a lot of its bone structure with a traditional build-stuff-kill-guys game. Unlike other civ games (for example, Civilization: A New Dawn, Mosaic, or Gentes) that have tried to incorporate concepts from euro-style mechanism-fests into their design framework, Near takes a holistic approach that makes it feel complete and cohesive, rather than a cobbled together bricolage.
A novel new mechanism: “cards”
At the beginning of Near, you get dealt a starting culture card (a personal endgame scoring condition), a wonder card (an in-game scoring condition), four regular cards from one of five colors, and a starting action bonus. Your wonder gives you a starting building, and in a very Terra Mystica-style start, you place some buildings out on the board and it’s SUPER IMPORTANT.
The game plays across 12 turns, and each turn, players will play two cards and then play passes to the next person. Your cards are mainly used for one of two things: building buildings, or doing cool stuff.
The cards come in five different colors, each corresponding with a different type of development direction: green makes production buildings, yellow makes money buildings, blue makes roads, red makes military, and purple makes religion. You build the buildings from the top of your player board to the bottom, and each subsequent building you build is more powerful. They don’t cost anything to build, and on top of their powers, you gain a resource or other benefit when you place them on the various hexes in the game.
This is my favorite part of the game. It’s freewheeling because it doesn’t cost anything, but you’ll only be able to do it a set number of times, limited by the number of buildings on the player board. The powers are potent as well, and each one has a bonus you can unlock by increasing your total of a livestock resource (a track at the top of your board). Green and yellow make resources and money, standard stuff, but the roads let you pick up your buildings (or the road you just built) and move them a number of spaces around the board. You can only build adjacent to things you’ve already built, so this is very useful, and makes the play on the map dynamic. Red has you placing “soldier” buildings, which either remove a piece on the space they land on, or can take one out a number of spaces away. This direct interaction is sharp, but ultimately doesn’t make you beat your chest in fury, because buildings that are destroyed are returned to a “graveyard” space on their owner’s board, where they can be replaced using the purple church buildings.
I’m doing more rules explaining than I’d like, but the details of Near are delicious. The other thing you can use a card for is to play it for its effect. Most are one-shots, but some are permanent abilities, representing a new innovation or development. They correspond with their color/building type, and often interact with buildings you’ve already placed. Many of the red cards have one-shot abilities that allow your soldiers to do additional attacks, for example. They also help—
Score: Points of Civilizations
Near owes a large debt to Terra Mystica. Its 12-round scoring features an end of round scoring every four rounds that rewards players for doing specific builds or gathering specific resources, à la the aforementioned game. You’re also trying to set yourself up for 5 different end game scoring objectives and avoid three random events that blast you each game. It’s a bit of a point buffet, but the nice effect of this is that it allows players to act a bit more creatively than games like this typically do. You might start as a military hegemon and then slowly convert to a peaceful trade society, or you might save up your murdered pieces for a series of religious building drops. There’s a ton of variability, and the system is full of robust, thoughtful design choices. For instance, the card market from which you draw two cards at the end of each turn only refills after four rounds of play. You either draw blind or take cards that players have played and discarded for building builds. (The cards that are played for powers stay in a personal tableau)
Near is the kind of design work I like to see because it makes you feel a little ~weird~ when you play it. The competition is fierce, but there’s a significant amount of heads-down play, and you feel invested in what other people are doing, even though you can’t typically do things to ruin their turns. The interaction in the game is unique from what I’ve seen of games of this type, and I want to keep hacking away at it. It has an epic scope, in spite of its frame being limited to antiquity, and it does a much better job making you feel like you’re at the reins of a mighty, card-driven civilization than games with twice the bits and twice the cards.
I’m not sure what the release date for this is, but I hope it’s successful, because I think this system is worth playing around with and expanding. Maybe take the name back to the drawing board. How about Cards: The Civilization-ing?
