I wanted to love this, but...

We finally tried 👽 Circadians: First Light. I love dice worker placement in general so I’ve been excited for a while to try this one.

You play as human explorers on the planet Ryh, where you discovered intelligent alien species. You have 7 rounds to get the most points by negotiating with them, fulfilling contracts, improving your base and mining precious gems. 🏆

⚙️At the beginning of a round an event card is drawn that modifies some rules, you roll your dice and plan your turn in secret. You can put your dice into your garages to take actions on the action boards or use them to power your farms for resources. After planning, you take actions with your dice in turn order, but always taking your leftmost die.

It’s all about cleverly managing your resources. There are several ways to get algae 🌿, power ⚡, gems 💎and water 💧, and you will need a lot of them. Almost every action will need these. Your dice are basically a resource too because negotiating and fulfilling contracts costs you a die. So you have to keep gaining new dice as well as you play.

I also like the clever way you can move your hex-shaped harvester around on the planet board that gets you resources each round in addition to your farms.

Still, we didn’t really enjoy our play even though the game is good. 🙁
It all boils down to the fact that First Light makes me think in a way that I don’t like - in the planning phase you have to plan everything that you are going to do. You have to think about which actions you want to do with which dice, what pip values and what resources you might need.
So you have to juggle a ton of things in your head, and the action spots themselves are quite limited. If someone takes a spot you wanted to use, it can be really hard to pivot, because your pip value or pool of resources just won’t work anymore.

That is our subjective preference though so it doesn’t make the game bad. Just that I personally would probably go for another game on the shelf that provides a more satisfactory minute-to-minute gameplay experience. I love the clever dice usage of the action boards and that a bigger value is not necessary more beneficial, and the table presence is great!😊