Civilizations built with dice

🏛️ Nova Era is a dice-drafting tableau-building civilization game with amazing colorful isometric art that immediately drew me in. 🤩 This is not one of the sprawling huge civ games, I’d say this is a light gateway-type experience for 2-4 players.

The game is centered around dice. 🎲 Each round you draft 3 dice to use for actions, where color and value both matter a lot. There are some interesting rules here! 🧐 If you draft a set of dice with a sum over 10, your unrest ✊ marker moves up (which is obviously not good). Having big values is generally better though. After drafting, one set of dice will remain next to the board - the values of these raise the different disaster tracks which will strike later during the round. So you also have to pay attention to what you don't choose. ☝️

As for the dice: you mostly use them to either generate matching colored resources 🧱, or to claim technology 🔬 or personality 👤 cards for your tableau or to “repair” cards after disasters by flipping them face up again.

Each era starts with a display of cards (4x4 in a 2p game). You can only ever take the bottom-most cards, which is a bit reminiscent of a tech tree. Unfortunately in our opinion this rule makes things a bit too random, especially when combined with the dice drafting. So you might have resources but no matching cards, or too low dice values to do anything good. Or maybe a card that would be nice is too high up in the display, and less useful later.

This is also one of those games where we had to recalibrate our expectations. 👉There are lots of colorful cards with synergies, but you’ll only get a few. There are only 3 Eras with 3 rounds each, so that’s 27 dice to do actions. Disasters are also a cool idea, but the way they work is sometimes frustrating - they punish your already small tableau. 😬 Newer techs can also make old ones obsolete, but on the flipside, some techs have an “evolved” version you get in the next era. 

Otherwise there are some fun decisions to be made and the game is very easy to teach. 🙃 You might need more players to make majority scoring more interesting, and that way there are also more cards and dice available. 👍