Clans Board Game First Impressions
“We have ground for believing that a noble form of socialism existed among the prehistoric and primitive people on this planet, the people that broke into restless groups after the ancient Deluge and went wandering over the globe.”
~ Edwin Markham
The game is set in late prehistory, a time of transition – when our distant ancestors, who had struggled and barely survived for ages in very small nomadic groups, began to feel that their lives would be more secure and less arduous if they formed larger groups. This led to the formation of the first villages.
This is the simplest of simple games… The board is divided up into different regions made up of different terrains. Each one of these regions gets a random Hut in one of five colours.
Each player secretly gets a token with one of these colours which will be their hidden colour for the game.
On your turn, you pick ANY region and move ALL huts in that region into an adjacent one. As long as the target region contains at least 1 Hut. You can never move into an empty region.
This continues in turn order until eventually one region will be isolated from all the rest, surrounded by empty spaces. It’s then scored.
Scoring
How it’s scored depends on the terrain type of this isolated region when compared to this track…
The active player takes the top chip from this track. Then if the terrain type is to the RIGHT of the chip, (known as the hostile terrain) the Huts are removed but no points are awarded.
If it is neither of the two terrains adjacent to the Chip, each colour represented in the isolated region scores one point for each Hut in that region and the Huts are removed.
So, if there were 2 Red, 1 Yellow and 1 Black in a region; Red, Yellow and Black would score 4 points each.
If the terrain type is to the LEFT of the chip, (favourable terrain) the Huts are scored in the same way, but each colour also scores the number of bonus points shown on the track.
The game ends when either there are no legal moves remaining or the 12th region is scored.
Players reveal their hidden colour and add 1 point per Chip they collected, most points win.
Clans Positives
It’s nice and simple with only one thing to do on a turn so turns are pretty quick.
It uses minimal brain power but does require some forward planning to isolate the right region, in the right terrain AND make sure you have a Hut of your colour in it.
It’s light enough to just play casually, then play again. It reminds me of games like Kingdomino in that way where it’s challenging enough to be interesting but light enough that playing it isn’t tense or stressful.
Clans Negatives
The Huts are top-heavy and tip when pushed… You want to slide them into the next region but it’s not easy to do when you’re moving more than 2 at a time. It would be better as beads or something easier to move. 🙂
Summary
Clans is A fun light game, one I think I’ll be up for playing quite often.
Update 19/07/2018: The new version of clans is out so I’ll pick that up 🙂
Jesta ThaRogue
