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Sapiens

Shelter and food for the tribe

Onwards to new horizons! The tribe needs shelter and food, so you place and connect tribal tiles to reach the valley. On the way you find food and new caves.

Each player has his own board for the valley, featuring six cave cases and shelter points. Five tribal tiles are on display as general sock, you hold eight mountain markers and place them into six caves and onto the two waterfalls, draw four tribal tiles and prepare fight, food and shelter markers.

You place your first tile into one of your six caves, the landscape scenes must correspond to the mountain marker in the cave and to the first case in the valley.  You take the mountain marker, score it, replace your tribal tile from open stock and refill the stock from the stacks. Then you place one tribal tile per turn, adjacent to a tile already there, adjacent scenes must be identical. Connected scenes score food points and the bonus of the respective scene. When the newly placed tile is scored and before you refill your hand, you can use a mountain marker for its bonus and then discard the marker.

If you cannot place a tribal tile, you must abandon the tribe and begin a new one in another cave. You can only add tiles to this new tribe and the new tribe can never connect to the abandoned one. When all tiles have been placed, you add up food and shelter points, disregard the higher value of the two and win with the highest remaining value.

Sapiens is an interesting mixture: The basic mechanism is simple and absolutely good for a family game, but the rules details for scene bonuses and mountain markers make it very tactical, very interactive and partly rather vicious.

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 45+

Designer: Cyrille Leroy

Artist: Marc-Antoine Allard

Price: ca. 35 Euro

Publisher: Catch Up Games / Iello 2015

Web: www.iello.fr

Genre: Placement, collecting

Users: For families

Version: fr

Rules: en fr

In-game text: no

Comments:

Simple basic mechanism

Lots of tactical interaction

Still works as a family game

Compares to:

Tile placement games for correlations and points

Other editions:

English edition, Iello

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0