Hadara First Impressions

Hadara has players draft and play cards of 5 different colours.

Can you get the right balance to build the best civilisation?

Hadara carries you off into the world of cultures and countries of this earth. Over three epochs, you will experience the transformation of your new world from a small settlement to a high culture. You want to populate this world with people who come from different cultures and continents as well as different ages. To bring glory and honour to your world, you should choose the persons and accomplishments skillfully. But you should not ignore agriculture, culture, and military power, otherwise one of your competitors might get bigger and more successful than you. Who will succeed first in creating a new flourishing high culture?

Hadara Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Each player has a player board with a symbol. In the middle of the table is a pentagon-shaped board divided into 5 colours each with a stack of cards of that colour on it. In the middle of that board is a 5-point dial containing each player’s symbol.

Phase A starts with players drawing 2 cards from the deck their symbol is pointing at, they discard one back to the central board and play one. Either by paying the costs or discarding it from the game to gain some money. Then the wheel is moved one space and this repeats until players have done this once for each of the 5 colour cards.

Then players take income in gold depending on where their token is on the yellow track.

Players then can choose to take a colony tile which gives a bonus or income depending on their red track.

Then players decide if they want to carve a statue depending on their position on the blue track.

Phase B starts with players choosing a top card from a discard pile on the board and either buying it or discarding it for money. This repeats until all cards discarded in phase A are gone.

They then gain income, a colony and a statue as they did in phase A. Then they also feed their people using their green track. They need to have as much food as they do cards in their civilisation.

Finally, they have a chance to buy medals for end-gaming scoring.

How do you win?

All these phases are repeated in 3 Epochs.

Colonies, statues, cards and remaining coins are all worth points.

Silver medals score points depending on how far you are on the track you select for that medal. Gold medals score for points for each full set of the 5 different coloured cards you have.

Most points wins.

Image Credit: BGG

Main Mechanisms

Drafting the cards technically although it doesn’t feel like traditional drafting. Set collection for the people you add to your civ as they not only increase your tracks but give you a discount on other cards of that colour.

USP

The dial on the board determining which deck each player draws from is very fun. I’m not sure if this is done anywhere else to allow this to change every turn.

Theme

I like that the theme is you’re diversifying your civilisation with different cultures to get the most out of it.

Setup

Boards out, cards out and you’re good to go!

Components & Artwork

Everything is fairly standard. The board with the dial works well and the player boards are partially punched through to hold tokens. I’d have liked them to be dual-layered to keep the 4 track tokens in place.

The iconography is very clear but I’m not a fan of the style of art, not that I looked at it during the game.

Image Credit: BGG

Ease of Teaching

The game is fairly easy to teach. The only non-visible cards are those drafted at the start of phase A but an experienced player could sit next to a newbie to help them out..

Similar Games

The way the turn order changes with the set collection made me think of St Petersburg a little bit. It also reminded me of Elysium a little bit too but it’s not that similar, just had a similar feel.

Hadara Review

Positives

Each of the phases is very simple and easy to follow.

The dial lets you know which cards to draw and the order you’ll draw from the decks which is important to know.

The phase where you go back through the cards previously discarded is a really fun phase and if you’re good enough you can even plan ahead to take advantage of this.

There are different ways to score and play.

Negatives

Some of the cards have weird symbology.

While bright and colourful, it doesn’t look great on the table with it also being an untidy table hog.

Summary

An easy to play game with a lot of strategy.

Jesta ThaRogue