Clans – Review
Designed by Leo Colovini, the Clans board game was published in 2002. This game uses a bluffing mechanism where players try to score points for their “Clan” color by creating villages.
Clans is:
- Designed by: Leo Colovini
- Published by: Rio Grande Games
- Number of players: 2-4
- Playing time: 30 minutes
- Player ages: 10+
The game comes in a nice small box with a 6-fold board, 60 huts in 5 different colors, 5 player-hut tokens and 12 village markers.
The map consists of 12 regions of 5 different terrains/territories. Each region will have 5 different colored huts placed before the game begins.
A Quick Overview
Each player in the game is the leader of a particular “clan”, or color, and try to form villages with other colors in various terrain.
In order to prosper, the leaders of each clan seek to form mutually beneficial villages with other players. Be careful not to form villages with all 5 different colors as this would cause strife!
Each leader also has the power to move any clan’s hut to any other adjacent area!
Colovini’s Clans board game is about strategic movement of clan huts such that your particular clan scores the most points.
At the start of the game, each player is randomly dealt a color specifying which clan they belong to. This information is kept secret from other players.
Game Play
This is a quick playing game. On a player’s turn all that can be done is to move one hut, from a particular terrain/territory, to another adjacent terrain/territory.
At the beginning of the game, each terrain only has one hut on it. As the game progresses, each terrain may have several huts on it.
Movement is restricted to adjacent, non-empty terrain. Huts can be moved across rivers but huts cannot be moved across lakes!
Also, if there are 7 or more huts present in a territory, that grouping of huts cannot be moved.
A village is formed when all adjacent territories around a group of huts is empty.
Once a village is formed, the player takes a “village creation” token from the board and scores points for all the clan colors represented in the newly formed village.
A clan scores points for the number of huts in a village.
For example, if a village is formed that consists of 1-blue, 3-red, 1-yellow huts then the blue, yellow and red all score 5 points.
Any “village creation” tokens are added to that player’s clan color. The winner is the one whose clan has the highest number of points.
The “village creation” tokens also serve as a game clock and provide dynamic bonuses for formed villages depending on when a village was formed.
Only 12 villages can be formed during the course of the game. Once the twelfth village is formed, the game ends.
Summary
I really enjoy playing this game because it is quick. At first the rules may appear to be a bit counter-intuitive. After a couple of turns, however, players will find that game play is quite simple.
The biggest draw of the Clans board game is that players attempt to score points for their own color without giving away what color they represent. This is the bluffing mechanism of the game that I enjoy very much.
Happy gaming.
