The Dawn of Pangaea is designer Thoman Franken’s second game, after the fairly successful Forests of Pangaea, which seems to have had a vowel change during the twisty journey from Kickstarter’s Forests of Pangaia to the retail version. It comes from publisher Treecer, responsible for games such as Zoo Tycoon and Darwin’s Choice.
Besides a title sharing a couple of words with the earlier game, give or take a vowel, Dawn of Pangaea is allegedly a distinct game—but there are a lot of overlaps in terminology and game concepts, not to mention the cute little trees, clearly enough that the project’s FAQ includes a brief explanation about the relationship between them: ‘DoP and FoP are two different standalone games […] that both take place in the same world of Pangaea. Tommy made a short video about the main differences.’ I get the impression it’s a little like Terraforming Mars vs Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition or Ark Nova vs Sanctuary, but I’ll let you be the judge, save to note one frustrating comment in the video… Some of the components in Forest were rather expensive to manufacture, making resulting in a higher price than Thomas wanted; the ‘solution’ with Dawn is to split the equivalent components into an expansion (see later), so while the base game is indeed cheaper, you’ll really want the expansion too, cancelling out the cost saving and more.
Game Play
The game board comprises multiple five-space ‘biome’ tiles, each having two water spaces and a cluster of three land spaces; there are four different biome types, corresponding to different… weather (?!?): sun, wind, rain and snow. The number of tiles depends on the number of players—two of each type of biome per player—arranged randomly. A ‘blessing’ token is placed on specially marked water spaces—when you acquire these, you gain additional free actions which can be played at any time.
On each of ‘land ritual’ and ‘creature ritual’ cards are dealt to every player, and an open market created by revealing two more of each type, the rest forming face down draw decks. The revealed cards have a randomly selected ‘favour’ token placed on them. Players take their ten trees, ‘spirit’ meeple and three seeds (only two of which are used in play; the third is for the scoring track, called the ‘sacred mountain’).
On each turn, players perform two out of the following five actions:
· Place one seed on any unoccupied land space on the board.
· Place up to two seeds on empty land spaces adjacent to your trees.
· Place your spirit on any water space and immediately grow all adjacent seeds (yours and your opponents’) into trees, and owners of the new trees gain weather tokens appropriate to the biome containing the trees.
· If you have the necessary favour token, place an ‘ancient guardian’ anywhere on the board.
· If you have the required weather tokens or trees, play a ritual card from your hand or from the market.
So, why do you want to grow trees? Land rituals are defined by starting and ending biome types, and to perform the ritual, you need a contiguous sequence of trees from one biome to the other—the line has to start and end with your trees, but can contain opponents’ trees along the way; spirits and Chelon (one of the guardians—see later) can provide a route across water (remember, trees grow only on land). The score for such a ritual is based on the number of trees in the route, and performing the ritual results in removing all of your scoring trees. Creature rituals are also based on trees, but less directly: their cost is a particular set of weather tokens, which you will have collected as a result of growing seeds into trees, and their score is indicated on the card. After performing a ritual, players replenish the market or their hand, as appropriate, and gain a favour token.
Once the player has already has played some ritual cards and has favour tokens in their hand, they can ‘activate’ a favour and place the matching ancient guardian on the board. Each guardian has an immediate benefit (e.g., Chelon gives the player a weather token from one of the adjacent biomes, and Thorondal prevents a tree from being removed after performing a land ritual) as well as an on-going one (as mentioned earlier, Chelon provides a route across water, and Okuma enables extra growth when any player’s spirit is placed).
When a player has more than five trees, they can grab the ‘most trees’ marker, which lets them exchange one of their weather tokens for another once per turn. The marker can switch ownership across the game, and it confers an extra two points to whoever has it at the end.
Talking about the end, it’s triggered when one player reaches 30 on the scoring track. The round completes, then each player can perform one more ritual if possible (adding to their score), and the most trees bonus is applied.
Solo Mode and Expansion
The game includes a solo/co-op mode, in which players must rescue the ancient guardians. The guardians start at one end of the scoring track and the ‘shadow’ at the other. On each turn, the guardians and shadow move a step closer, but by performing rituals, you can move the guardians back again. The aim is to return the guardians to their starting space before the shadow meets them.
As already mentioned, the Kickstarter campaign includes an expansion, Wild Woods. This allows trees to grow higher (a mechanic that I believe was in Forests), which lets you plant your seeds farther away than immediately adjacent to the tree. Additionally, performing the growing trees action in the game can enable you to bring more seeds into play via freeing up spaces on a new player board. The expansion contains a couple of additional blessing types as well.
I like how this expansion adds to the complexity of the game, allowing more interesting strategies to be developed than possible in the base game alone, but I do feel they ought to have been bundled together rather than requiring a whole separate box.
On the subject of complexity, the rule book for the base game also offers a simpler mode, removing all mention of the ancient guardians. This and the expansion do allow the difficulty of the game to be ramped up or down to suit a range of different games groups.
Components
The standard game’s wooden player tokens are nicely made and attractive, and its weather, etc. cardboard pieces look fine, possibly apart from the most trees standee. A deluxe version is available at quite a considerable price hike with wooden weather tokens and a much better looking most trees marker, as well as a few other bits and bobs. It also includes a bigger game box with a nice insert and component boxes, and a completely over the top scoring track! The standard game’s sacred mountain is a perfectly adequate flat card displaying numbers 1 to 30 in a spiralling track. The deluxe version is a chunky ten-layer spiral instead. I’m not convinced it’s worth going deluxe for this game—though the basic most trees standee is uuuugly.
The game is colourful and attractive, with nicely illustrated cards. You can find out plenty more about it on its Kickstarter page, along with a link to a Tabletop Simulator mod.
About the Author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
