Nova Era

CMON games I feel are typically known for their bigger grandiose crowdfunded games filled with minis, like Zombicide, so I was interested to see how this direct to retail one would be like. The civ-builder theme and vibrant artwork pulled my interest when I first heard about it for upcoming games coming out this year.

In Nova Era, you draft dice that you'll use for actions for each round of the game. With only 3 eras and each era having 3 rounds each its meant to be a quick game.

The color and value of each dice offering weighs as that's what you'll be using for the round. Higher valued dice are typically better but if the sum of the dice pool is greater than 10 then you'll be paying the extra in increasing Unrest - a personal track that you'll be managing as the end of the track has negative consequences.

The left over dice get used to bump up the disaster tracks, which if it reaches the bottom all players will have to deal with something at the start or end of the round. The worst being a Dark Age which will force everyone to give up a die and subtract one from all remaining dice.

Evolving technology

The system of technology cards is really interesting. As you build technology cards for your civilization, some of them may make other technologies Obsolete, effectively forcing players to discard cards from their tableau. On the flip side some technology cards will give you their evolved version at the end of the era so you gain potential Technology to build that only you have access to. You want to build up in technology since majority for each type gives you points and the end of every era. Plus some card effects care about who has the most of a type or if an opponent owns specific technologies.

There's planning and strategy with when to take from the offered technology grid as only the bottom most cards are available to develop.

Rules confusion

I got half way through my first two handed solo learning game when I started to question if I was playing it right. In particular is for the Develop Technology action and the usage of "and/or". In my mind, this almost reads like you can take this action without spending a die and use just Resources alone to pay for the cost.

However, this doesn't really make sense when you factor the addendum in the action.

The player may use a die of a different color, in which case, the cost must be paid in full with Resources of a matching color.

I had to ask myself "why would you use a die of a different color if you could just pay for it with resources outright?" Clearly there must be a situation where you spend a die in order to build it. Then, looking at the overarching "Spending Dice" phase for taking actions it states the following:

... players must take turns spending 1 die at a time to perform 1 of the following actions

Based on this, I reasoned that my first attempt Iwas playing wrong and taking extra turns by taking actions without spending dice. So I scrapped the game at the end of the first Era and started a second game to try playing correctly with using a die per action.

And while the game became a bit more crunchy in terms of being intentful for how to spend an action, I got kind of annoyed in Era 3 when I wanted to do so much more. I ended up caving into my desires and went with my house rule of "as long as you got resources, build it". Because it just wasn't satisifying to not be able to play more cards in a game.

Feeling limited

There's so many Technology and Personality cards per era it felt odd to me that you only get to see very few per game. In setup they show the decks out and shuffled ready to be used, but in practice they're only used for the beginning of the era and the rest of the cards won't be seen that game. It's funny, there are many other examples of games where you won't see everything, games that have gigantic card counts of possibilities: Ark Nova, Terraforming Mars: Ares Exepedition, Wingspan just as examples. Those games you're very much not going to see every card every game, and yet that aspect is fine with those games.

I guess the main difference from initial impression is that for Nova Era it feels odd that the displays don't get refreshed between rounds of an era. Once the Technologies and Personalities are laid out for an era, that's it. In some ways I would describe the feeling as though my options have become stale whereas in the earlier examples you're always getting or seeing new cards even if you won't get to use all of them.

I get that perhaps functionally the game doesn't work if you get "free" actions all the time or if more cards are added to the display, but I can't say it feels good either. Besides, there are cards with the rare ability to do actions for free so there are ways to bend the rules and get more action economy.

The classic argument of "it just means you get to play more times" could be used but I want the desire of playing a game again to come from wanting to try again versus feeling like you only saw a sliver from the one play. Like, in Wingspan, what you build will always be different based on the cards you experience in play, and there's anticipation in the draw of cards. While Nova Era shares a lot of similarities: a set number of actions per game, randomized cards, etc. – I think the fact that the decision space only evolves from era to era takes away from the turn to turn anticipation that other games provide.

It's strategic in a different way, not a bad one but maybe not one I'm always wanting as an experience.