Nova Era is a dice drafting, tableau building game.

Title: Nova Era

Year Published: 2025

Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio

Publisher: CMON

Players: 2-4

Game Time: ~90 mins

Set-up Time: ~5 mins 

Ages: 12+

Theme: Alternate Earth

Mechanisms: Tableau Building, Dice Drafting, Resource Management.

How to win: Score the most points after developing your civilisation over 3 Eras.

Game Description

Guide your civilization from humble tribal beginnings to vast scientific empires, navigating the twists and turns through eras of history. Harness the power of technology, expand territories, and enlist famous (and sometimes infamous) personalities from across history. Civilizations face constant threats from rival nations, natural disasters, social unrest, and the ever-looming possibility of a dark age.

How to play Nova Era

Learn how to play Nova Era in a quick and concise way.

Main mechanisms

You draft dice which are used to take actions and you draft a zone of 3 at a time. I’m still counting it as dice drafting rather than ‘action drafting’ as listed as this as on BGG even though it’s more than one die at a time.

You’re also building and managing a tableau as well as managing the resources required to build the cards in it.

USP

I was sold on it being a non-mini game from CMON and a dice game from the designer of Kingsburg. Apart from that, not much to sell you this game.

Theme

Playing an alternate Earth can be fun, I like the stories that can be told. The way old technologies are made obsolete by new ones helps with the theme of the game.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup involves laying our cards depending on the player count. Everything else is easy and quick.

The rulebook does a good job. Some important little rules are not as prominent as they should be and some other bits are missing for clarity. Having said that, the examples are good and clear.

Components & Artwork

Everything is OK. I like everything but there’s something about cardboard resources that feels cheap to me now. I’m spoilt with wooden ones in most games.

However, a few cards were released with misprints which is disappointing and means I need to print some new cards already.

The art is nice and the game has a nice clean and clear look. The iconography and graphic design is spot on.

Ease of Teaching

There are only 7 actions and most of them are very simple. There are also only 2 hidden cards and the rest are open information.

The player board and main board have a lot of reminder text which I really appreciate.

Similar Games

I mentioned Kingsburg where you roll 3 dice and use them to gain resources and take actions. Here you draft 3 rolled dice which mitigates the randomness from Kingsburg.

While there is more to this game, it does feel like an evolution of that 18 year old game.

Nova Era Review

Positives

Rules light and easy to teach.

Helper text all over the game to take the load off your memory.

Drafting dice helps with removing luck from your die rolls.

It looks nice on the table with it’s light, pastel colours.

Not all of the card are used in the game so there will be some variety game to game. This helps with the replayability.

Negatives

Cardboard resources tokens in 2025 although I appreciate the cheap price point.

It can be mean.

Nova Era Round-Up

A very fun and nice looking game with plenty of variability.

Rating

I give it 6/10