A streamlined civ game that’s easy to learn

🏛️ Hadara 🏛️ is quite an abstract tableau-builder card-drafting game, cleverly disguised as a civilization game. You collect cards over 3 epochs, managing your money and four tracks, trying to get the most points at the end.

The board is a pentagon, split into five parts/colors. Every color has its own deck of cards that represent inventions or people that will strengthen your civilization. Your player board also has 4 tracks of these 5 colors. They correspond to:
🟨 Yellow: Finance, which gives you income.
🟥 Red: Military, needed for conquering colonies.
🟦 Blue: Culture, needed for carving statues.
🟩 Green: Agriculture, needed for feeding your people.
🟪 Purple: Special. There is no purple track, but this color has cards that give either ongoing abilities or advancements on the other 4 tracks.

⚙️ During the epochs you will be drafting cards which you can either buy or sell. Money is quite tight in this game, so you will keep having to sacrifice certain cards in order to afford other ones. Cards will always advance some of your tracks.
🧐 Yellow is always good as a source of money. With red and blue you will always need to reach new thresholds to be able to use them - colonies and statues either get you points or even more track movement. Green is very important too: at the end of an epoch you need to have at least as much green, as cards you have in your tableau.

💬 There is not too much going on in this game, but there a bunch of micro-decisions each turn. Which card do you take? Do buy it, or sell it in anticipation of something better? You are also always trying to reach certain thresholds on the tracks.
With colonies you can decide to plunder them for money, or pay to befriend them to flip the tile and get bonuses. Statues involve choosing to get victory points, or advance a certain track. At the end of an epoch you can also buy medals which are important end game points, but cost a lot of money - and will cost even more in later epochs, so it’s worth investing early.

All in all I am happy we could try out Hadara at Spielwiesn, but I don’t think I would buy it. It is fun, but quite simplistic and with not a ton of replayability in my opinion.