What we love about Oros

We have been really enjoying playing 🌋 OROS as you might have seen it already. 🥰 Being a demigod is a real blast, but how do you shape the world and create mountains and sacred temples? 🤔 Let’s look under the hood!

The game is controlled by moving meeples between action spots on your player board. You can do 3 actions on your turn. An action that is currently covered by a meeple cannot be chosen, so you have to keep moving them. The more followers you have, the more constricted you are.
☝️To help with this you can send out followers to study, either to special slots on your board or to sacred sites you have built on the map. However if you call back studying meeple you get experience points, which makes your abilities more versatile. So it’s a balancing act of getting experience but also not having too many blocked spots.

You have 3 main actions to influence the landmasses on the game board:
↕️ One of them shifts an entire row or column, with tiles keeping their distance from each other.
➡️ The second one moves just a few connected tiles in a direction, causing collisions - when that happens you just add together the values of tiles; 4 is the maximum number, the excess points get added as volcanoes. If two 4s collide you get a mountain.
🌋 The third ability makes volcanoes erupt, making new landmasses or adding to the value of existing tiles.
It’s also important to mention that tiles loop from one side of the map to the other as the earth is spherical.

The remaining actions on your board are for building, studying and moving meeples on the map. Mountains are where you can build shrines and temples - keep in mind they are also immovable! Building is another way of getting experience and also moves you up on the ziggurat track which is a timer for the game.

Every action has its limitations, but will be improved as you get experience. There are 8 tracks to go up on, so you have to choose what you focus on. You can't do everything - not at all! You have to tailor your strategy according to how the current game is going.

In a later post we will also highlight the automas of OROS - they are needed in a game with less than 3 players! 🙂