Oros is a game of making a breaking volcano on an island.

Also, building shrines.

The Wise One, immortal keeper of wisdom and knowledge, has sent Demigods endowed with earth-moving power to the far reaches of humanity. In Oros each player acts as one of these Demigods. They must instruct their Followers in the wisdom of the mountains through study, worship, and experience. And only in the heights of the mountains can the greatest mysteries be known.

Oros Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players have a player board with 6 actions. On their turn, they move a follower to an empty action space and take that action.

These allow you to move tiles, and smash them together to form volcanoes or erupt volcanoes to spread them apart. Move followers around tiles and build sacred sites.

How do you win?

Players score points for sacred sites and how far up they are on the ascension track, most point wins.

Main Mechanisms

Action selection on your player board and a bit of tile laying… kinda. You move them and manipulate them but it’s not standard tile-laying.

USP

The moving of the tiles is quite unique. They slide around the board mashing up into volcanoes and erupting down into land masses you can walk your followers across.

Theme

Gods and all that stuff. It’s a loose theme but they do their best with it.

Setup

Putting the specific tiles in specific spaces takes a while.

Components & Artwork

The components are really nice. The tile holders are useful. The meeples are cool too.

The art is nice and colourful.

Ease of Teaching

Once you understand the action on the board and the scoring you’re fine. There are some niggles with the tiles moving but it’s not that difficult to learn.

Similar Games

I mean, there are so many fairly bland, forgettable mid-weight euros I could list here.

I’ll go with Rise of Tribes because it felt similar to me.

Oros Review

Positives

It looks really nice.

The moving of the tiles is fun…

Negatives

…at first, you soon run out.

If you’re not part of the main island, you can get left behind.

It’s not that interesting.

There are a lot of 60-120 minute fairly accessible euros that are worth playing.

Summary

I’m writing this 4 weeks after I played it and I can barely remember it. Very bland.

Jesta ThaRogue