A turn-based game of economy & war for 2–6 nations. Grow your people's welfare, expand by conquest, and finish with the highest score.
Press New game to choose players, computers and a map size, or Quick start to jump straight into a 4-player small game. The map behind this card is just a preview.
New here? Take the guided tour — it walks you through a turn on the real board.
You lead one of 2–6 nations. Each round you score your people's welfare; these add up over the game (20 rounds by default) and a bonus rewards how strong you finish — the highest total score wins. Welfare for a tile is its scarcest civilian good ÷ its population; your nation's score is these totalled across your tiles and divided by your total population, so every citizen counts equally — and a balanced nation beats a lopsided one.
You can also win by being the last nation standing — but beating a single rival isn't enough on its own: with 3–4 players you must outlast every rival, or simply finish ahead on score.
The bar across the top is your turn: the round, whose turn it is, the four phases, and the button that ends the current one. Click one of your territories to select it — its numbers appear in the right-hand panel, and the map glows to point at what's worth doing.
Standings and Chronicle live in the drawer on the left.
Civilian goods can't be spent directly — tax them into the state purse first. The four goods each do one job: food feeds soldiers, iron recruits them, stone builds roads, gold funds research.
Besides soldiers you command one ruler. It eats no food and is shielded — soldiers are always lost first, so it only fights when it's the last unit on a tile. While it sits on a tile it also adds +0.1 to that tile's defending roll, even when shielded behind soldiers. It can attack, move and retreat like a soldier. Losing it is permanent, but it does not eliminate you; only losing your last territory does.
A road links two tiles' civilians, who automatically swap goods at the start of each turn — one good for one, and only when the trade leaves both sides more balanced. Trade runs a couple of sweeps, so goods can ripple several tiles along a chain of roads. It even works across borders (you need own just one end), so a road is often faster and cheaper than taxing one tile and subsidizing another to even out resources. Because each tile makes only one good, roads are the main way to balance — and balance is what welfare rewards.
Roads are also your highways. A continuous road running through your own land lets a convoy move armies, your ruler and state goods rapidly across the empire in one hop — without roads a convoy reaches only an adjacent tile you own. A good road network doubles as a military road: rush reinforcements to a threatened front, or shift your ruler to safety.
Harvest and road trade happen at the start of your turn. A convoy leaves the moment you send it but only arrives at the start of your next turn. If its destination has been lost by then it returns to its origin (if you still hold it); if both ends are lost, it's destroyed.
Plan a turn ahead. You tax in Redistribute — after you Build — so you recruit, build roads and research with the state purse you start the turn holding. You can't tax this turn to pay for this turn's building; tax now to fund next turn's recruiting. And a tile you just captured is in disarray — until your next turn it can't build, recruit, tax, subsidize, research or attack (it can still receive incoming convoys), so don't count on a fresh conquest to pay for anything this turn.
Tip: welfare is capped by your scarcest good — keep all four balanced rather than hoarding one.
Each resource appears as a coloured land tile and a matching token in the pills — wheat = food, ore = iron, block = stone, coin = gold. A tile's owner is the coloured outline around it; the banner marks the tile holding your ruler. Tax moves civilian → state; subsidize moves state → civilian.
The board lights up whatever is worth your attention this phase. It's a hint, not a rule — the action itself will always tell you if it can't be done.
Selecting one of your tiles arms that phase's action: in Expansion it readies an attack, and in Redistribute, loading a convoy lights every tile you could send it to. Press Esc — or click the tile again — to stand down.
Choose how many nations play, how many are computers, and the map. Set computers equal to players to watch a computer-only battle.