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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Z-Man Games |  Gheos Gheos Price: £20.99 Out of Stock Tile Game, 2-4 Players, Ages 10+ by Z-Man Games The players are gods at the dawn of time, creating earth\'s landscape and inhabiting it with people. Over the course of the game, players will command the creation and destruction of continents, and the rise and fall of civilizations! Players try to gain followers among the several civilizations and to score points by offering those followers luxuries and by building temples and pyramids on their components. The player who accumulates the most points over the course of the game is the winner! ********** 2-4 players, 45 minutes designed by Ren Wiersma reviewed by Simon Weinberg Z-Man games were showcasing their new game Gheos at Essen this year, and I was lucky enough to get a four-player game at their stall. This first game was good enough to guarantee instant purchase, with two plays over the next two nights, and another four or five games since then. Gheos - the name is apparently derived from the words ``geo\'\' and ``chaos\'\' - is set in ancient times when landmasses are being formed and destroyed, and civilisations are born and banished. Players take the role of Gods, manipulating land formations, and causing war and migration to further the civilisations in which they have followers. The theme is a light one and soon set aside; the game however is far from light. The game consists chiefly of a set of 60 tiles and thirty wooden ``follower\'\' cubes in six different colours, representing the six different civilisations. A wooden counter in each colour is used to mark which landmass a civilisation occupies. Small, slightly fiddly, numbered tokens are used to tally victory points. The thick cardboard tiles are triangular in shape and, with the exception of 8 ``Epoch\'\' cards, each triangle shows between one and three land formations separated by seas. If land touches only one side of the tile it is considered a shore; if it extends to two or all three edges it is a called a landmass. Players start with two tiles each and a starter tile is laid on the table. On their turn, each player begins by placing one of their two tiles. Every tile is compatible with every other tile in the box, and tiles thus placed may start a new landmass and will also either extend or round off a continent already formed. If an unoccupied continent is formed, then as a second action the player may start a civilisation on that continent by placing on it a round wooden counter of an unused colour. In addition to showing continents, shores and seas, tiles also show a number of different symbols which will influence how they are used. For example, when a new civilisation is formed, the active player may take followers (wooden cubes) of the corresponding colour equal to the total number of wheat symbols on the continent. If the player extends an existing continent, he may instead choose a single follower of any civilisation already formed; however there are only five followers available so that in the early game players are forced to spread their stocks of different civilisations to maximise their score. Victory points are scored on the basis of cup or a pyramid symbols shown on the tiles of each continent. Each player holds three special scoring tokens, and may discard one token to score points at the end of their turn, with one point being earned per follower per cup in that follower\'s continent. Points can quickly add up in this way, but the timing of scoring is important as will become apparent later! Additionally, when replenishing his played tile, a player may draw an Epoch tile rather than a land tile from the box. This signifies the end of an epoch, and all pyramids are scored - one point per follower on their continent (all players score). After playing a tile, a player will thus choose which follower he wants based on their potential scoring ability. As continents grow and accumulate cups and pyramids, so scores grow higher. Finally, tiles may also show a sword symbol - more about that later - or a cup, sword or wheat Temple; if this temple is joined to a continent the player immediately scores one point per cup, sword or wheat symbol on that continent, irrespective of the number of followers he owns. The game thus far consists of playing tiles to collect followers; cutting off the threatening expansion of an opponent\'s continent; expanding a continent in which you have a lot of followers; and scoring points either through placement of temples, through drawing an epoch card, or through playing one of three scoring tokens. This in itself would be enough to make Gheos a fairly interesting game. However, the gameplay goes well beyond this with an original mechanism that significantly deepens players\' options. Instead of playing next to an existing tile, players may elect, at the cost of one follower of any colour, to play on top of an existing tile, replacing that tile to cause \'War\' or \'Migration\'. If the new tile joins together two occupied continents originally separated by water, then war ensues, and the civilisation with the highest number of swords symbols wins; the other civilisation is vanquished, the civilisation marker is removed from play, and all followers of that colour are returned by players to the common pool. The new tile may also split a continent into two or even three parts. Here, the civilisation migrates to the continent with the largest number of wheat symbols, and since the wheat symbols of the newly placed tile count, the player will often be able to steer the civilisation of his opponents into a smaller or lower scoring continent. If he manages to steer the civilisation to an island, which is land made up of only two shores placed together, the civilisation does not have enough land to survive and is vanquished: an effective way to bring down vengeance on a civilisation which has plenty of swords! When a given number of Epochs have been drawn, the game ends with a final scoring round. The player with the highest victory points is the winner; ties are broken on the number of followers. Gheos is a tense, strategic game packed into a small playing time, and hits the mark as a short gamers\' game. Play is interactive and fast, with a small amount of luck in the draw. Players have a limited but conflicting number of choices: which continents to expand, how and when to score, and which followers to take, as well as when to start a war or migration to see off another player. With good players the game is balanced, with large civilisations being susceptible to a beating-down or complete destruction; the challenge is to time when to attack and maximise your points. As Epoch tiles are drawn, followers accumulated, and continents expanded, play gets increasingly tense and pressure mounts to play a scoring token before a profitable continent is destroyed or the last Epoch tile is drawn. Comparisons with Carcassone are inevitable but baseless; comparisons with Tigris and Euphrates are justified only because the theme and feel of the game is vaguely similar - I am very happy to own both games. Despite a minor quibble over the scoring tokens, I can thoroughly recommend the game, which will certainly merit many trips to our gaming table. 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