Abducting cows and humans

🛸 Silos is a Reiner Knizia game through and through: it uses game mechanics distilled to their most basic forms, and it has a simple, easy to teach ruleset. The challenge comes from playing well and timing things right. It is all about area majority with set collection added on top, and it works well! 😉

Silos from Bitewing Games is actually a remake of the 2008 game Municipium, and unless you are an avid fan of Ancient Roman historical themes, this is an unbelievably huge upgrade. There is a quirky alien theme, as players play alien factions who are abducting humans and cows alike, and the art is really striking and humorous too. 😁

The game board shows 7 locations of a town, which you infiltrate as aliens. Before starting the game, each player places their 7 alien meeples one after the other, filling up the locations. Then, the game can begin! 👇

It’s all very simple: 🧐 Each turn you can do up to 2 movements with your meeples, then you have to draw and activate a card. That’s it! 😮 The card could either be from the shared deck of 12 cards, or one of your personal 3 one-use special cards.

There are 3 core things that can happen with cards:
🛸The UFO could move clockwise between locations - wherever it lands you check for majority, with 1st place claiming the cow there, and the 2nd place claiming the human.
👤You can draw and place human meeples from a bag to the “focus groups” of the locations. Whenever the 3 spaces are filled somewhere, you check for majority, and hand out those meeples accordingly.
🏪One or more location-powers could activate depending on the card’s type. Whoever has the majority at a location can use its power. It’s all about getting yourself into more favorable positions all around the map, in anticipation of upcoming majority scorings.

There are 4 different human meeple types, and you want to collect sets of 4 different colors (with cows acting as wilds), to exchange them for ‘societal power emblems’. Earn 5 of these and the game is over, so it is a race of efficient set collection. The board state is constantly changing, so you really have to anticipate what cards are coming and cleverly keep repositioning yourself. 😉