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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Utopia Utopia Price: £44.99 This item normally ships in 2 - 3 days. RRP - £48.99 Board Game; 3-5 Playersl Ages 12+ by Rio Grande Games Take the role of one of the ministers of Utopia in this strategy game for 2 to 5 players. To succees, you will have to be flexible and find the best ways to accomodate and move the royal princes. You will also find it imperative that you participate in the building of the most prestigious monuments and most awe-inspiring wonders! The rules of Utopia are simple to understand, but the strategies are many and the game flow is contantly changing, making for both a challenging and extremely replayable game. +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine Review +++++++++++++++++++++ designed by Ludovic Vialla and Arnaud Urbon reviewed by Ben Baldanza Every year more majority games come into publication, and every year some become destined to just gain dust on the shelf until they are given away or sold. Utopia is likely to stand the test of time a bit longer than normal, in part because the game play is solid and enjoyable and in part because the game has super components and looks terrific. Players work to become the first to gain 50 prestige points, and those points are earned through a process of placing princes in districts and building monuments. It is these monuments, and the special ones called the Wonders, that make up the game\'s great bits. The large and colorful board shows four islands, unevenly divided into 24 districts. The game uses five civilizations common to all players, and each player gets prince tokens with representatives from each civilization in their player color. These tokens are placed into the districts and are used in various ways to score points. Each of the civilizations has a specific monument style, and players use cardboard bases in their color to show who owns what. In addition, each of the four islands has a place for a Wonder, and these are special buildings that come with their own unique value. The game is played in rounds of three phases, with the first two phases setting up the scoring phase. There are important ways to gain prestige within the first two phases as well, but the bulk of the scoring takes place in phase three. Phase one is all about getting your prince tokens onto the board. This is done with an interesting process of guest arrivals. Special ``guest\'\' tokens are drawn from a bag and each shows a region (one of the four islands) color and has a symbol of one of the five civilizations. In order, players remove a guest token and replace it with a specific prince token in their color, matching the civilization of the guest. They place their token into any of the districts of the island represented by the guest\'s color. This process normally allows each player to place three tokens onto the board. Phase two begins after all the guests are replaced with player\'s princes, and this phase uses action cards. The cards each designate one of the five civilizations. Each player is dealt five, but only the player last in the turn order gets to use all five while others discard one or two. Players use the cards to do one of four different actions. Three of these actions affect prince tokens: move, add, or remove. The fourth action with the cards is to change the relative value of the civilizations. During the scoring phase to come, the value of the monuments placed is determined by the order on a prestige scale. So a bit like Reef Encounter (though this may be a stretch), players have to be conscious not only of what their position is on the board but also how to increase the relative value of the monuments they build. During either of these two phases, prince tokens played can be spent to construct. To build one of the four Wonders, a player must remove one prince token from each of the five civilizations on a single island. This construction is worth six points immediately plus the owner of the Wonder scores prestige each time a new monument is placed on that same island. As a result, the value of the Wonder is greater the earlier it is built. The other use of the prince tokens is to control a district, which is designated by building a monument. A player must remove three tokens of the same civilization type from a single district to do this, and they place a monument of that civilization type in the district with their color base under it to show that it is theirs. Monuments do not score immediately, but score during each phase three. Neither Wonders nor monuments change ownership once built; this is a pure majority game with no conquest concept. After the action card phase (phase two) completes, players score for each district they control (for each monument they\'ve built, that is). The value is determined by the prestige scale, so typically some action cards are saved to adjust this scale just before the scoring phase begins. In most majority games, turn order matters and Utopia is no exception. The game defines turn order based on scoring position. Since this can change within the phases, the next player to go is always the next in the scoring line that hasn\'t yet had a turn that round. This is intuitive but at times it can be a bit confusing if there are breaks in the game or lots of chatter in between. The game ends when any player has reached 50 or more points after the end of phase three, and of course the player with the most prestige wins. This makes building monuments even as the game is coming to an end well worth it, and often the action card phase is used to move princes or change positions of princes in order to get the right mixture to build. Utopia is not deep and most of the decisions are straightforward, but the game works very well and is easy to teach. Usually there is enough room to go for your district strategy and not fight with others; if you\'ve dedicated one or two princes to an area and someone else builds the monument, you have to spend resources to move those princes to work for you elsewhere or use one of them to help build the Wonder. The guest tokens determine which civilizations get built, and these tend to even out over the game but this has to be watched closely. If you focus on building monuments in civilizations not well represented, you will have most of the other players fighting against you on the prestige scale. This fate is determined in the original selection of the guest tokens. The game looks nicer as it is played, like Manhattan or Cleopatra, and walking by you can sense how much longer the game has to play based on how full the board is. The game comes in a Kronos-sized box (same company, go figure ...) meaning that it requires a hefty amount of shelf space. The joint publication with Rio Grande is excellent and includes multiple language rules, all clear and colorful with good examples. We probably won\'t be playing this much in a few years, but for the next few months it will hit the table regularly especially with lesser experienced gamers. 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