Origins: First Builders

Enjoyable! I love dice Euros and this one fits into my preferred wheelhouse. Lots of meaningful choices and interesting use of the dice.

This has a superficial resemblance to Rajas of the Ganges, with the use of dice to value your worker, though in Origin, the dice are your workers and there is an aging aspect that is interesting. There is also a tile laying aspect as another similarity. Though it is still a passing resemblance, if you liked that, you might like this.

The game is fairly wide open and a point salad, so not as tight as other games it might be compared to. Regardless it is one we really like.

weak building placement, too weak, and too complicated for the result.

Game is OK, aviary is better

Like one of the T games, but a tad bit lighter. Lighter on theme, too.

A solid worker placement puzzle but not very thematic. Worth playing but not "bust it out every time" experience. I suspect it takes several plays before you can see the path through the game tho. The best strategy isn’t readily apparent even to a practiced eye like myself.

Going to play this some more and rerate it as we've played it wrong every time.

Nicer than it seems, landed at an 8.

I love dice as workers and this game is one of the best I've played as far as implementation of the mechanic (especially the aging workers). The city building and tracks felt a little unconnected though, just sort of all over the place and incoherent. Would definitely give it another shot.

This is a tough game to rate and review. We enjoyed it quite a lot, it's definitely a nice mixture of mechanisms, and presents players with very interesting choices (will you use this die as a Seat of Power, or do you want to use it one more turn? But if you do, it will go towards the Advisory track..and you'll have to keep investing in other dice; also, will you use as a Seat of Power a die color that triggers the tiles that you placed, or one that will be more rewarding towards the end of the game when Seats of Power are scored?)

The way dice drafting works, and how it's combined with tile placement is definitely interesting. I also like how only the lowest positions on the temple tracks are taken into account when determining how much points you score for them.

The way the Motherships rotate each time they are used, and you require increasingly more experienced workers, is also fascinating, and so is the way your Archon gains more powers the more Advisors you have.

However, I would have wanted to see more personality for the temples. Letting aside the Zodiac cards that are randomly placed on top of the temple tracks at the beginning of the game, there is nothing to distinguish the Sea Temple from the Mountain Temple or from the Third Temple. I would have loved for instance to see some different requirements for advancing on one of the tracks, or some small rewards given by one of them, as well as an easier way to tell them apart at first glance (because some of the tiles reference them).

Components-wise, Origins is a mixed bag. You've got some perfectly serviceable dice, some very nice miniatures (only 4 of them, different only in color), and some cool-looking motherships. However, tiles are very small and there's a lot of text on them. The main board is...ok, but the arena on the bottom half of the board is huge given the information conveyed there. The resource tokens are quite bad, and not easy to tell apart - given that you handle them for most part of the game, you really wish that they would have looked and felt better. Lastly, you have to stack small tokens on top of each other on one of your tiles, which is not ideal.

That aside, I want to emphasize that we enjoyed the gameplay quite a lot. Besides these small gripes concerning production (and the fact that the tracks should have been a bit more interesting in our opinion), this is a very solid title. I prefer the T-series by Board and Dice to Origins, but this one is also easier to understand, easier to play, and quite fast (1 hour and a half in 2 players, with rules explanations).

Review copy by Board and Dice.

It's difficult to build your city and do a secondary point engine as well. I'd like to know how you can possibly win with a temple track strategy.

I'm torn on this one. Some really interesting decisions here. And the combos builds very nicely. But I'm just not sure all of the elements work well together. It's almost like the mechanics are separate mini-games, all executed with varying success: the military track is under-powered, the temples are way over-powered, the buildings are something else entirely. There are plenty of turns and interesting end game conditions. I'd play again.