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Designer: Leo Colovini
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Year Published: 2002
Price: $27.95
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 2 3 4
Age Range: 10-up Family Teen
Game Type: Hidden roles

The necessities of life are considered to be food, water, and shelter from the elements. Good things all, you can hardly argue against them being essential to your well-being. Leo Colovini, however, would like to add another element to the list: the ability to form relationships with your neighbors and show them who’s boss of the land.

Clans brings players back to the dawn of time, when small groups of people lived in settlements isolated from their strangely-colored peers. The game board, which consists of four types of terrain divided into 60 regions, starts with a small wooden hut on each region; these huts come in five colors (black, blue, yellow, red, green) which are placed semi-randomly at the start of the game.

Each player’s turn is simplicity itself: You take all of the huts from one region and move them into an adjacent region that still contains huts. (Once a region is empty, it’s empty for the rest of the game.)

If your move isolates a village—that is, if the huts in a region are now surrounded by empty regions or the edge of the board—that village is now scored. Each color in that region receives points equal to the number of huts present. For example, if a village holds two blue huts, one yellow hut, and three red huts, then blue, yellow and red each score six points. Note, however, that if all five colors are present, some inter-tribal strife breaks out and all colors with only a single hut are removed from the region prior to scoring.

The scoring can also be affected by where the village was founded. At first, villages in forests earn each tribe an extra point while villages in mountains are worthless, but once you enter the second epoch, after the founding of four villages, mountain villages are suddenly worth two extra points and the grassland villages are zeroed out. Only twelve villages will be founded by game’s end, and the shifting bonuses and bombs give you something new to consider each turn.

No matter how many points a village scores, the founder of that village receives a scoring token. After the twelfth village is founded, players reveal their colors and add one point to their score for each scoring token they hold. High score wins.

A big part of the game is concealing your tribe’s color so that other players can’t group your huts together, which lessens your scoring opportunities, or isolate your huts, which gives them a scoring token and you only one point. At the same time, you naturally want to figure out which colors your opponents hold. With four players, the elements of concealment and deduction are largely lost since four of the five colors represent players and there’s only one “safe” color to which you can throw points—not that you generally know what that color is, mind you.

With two and three players, however, Clans become a far trickier game because you can make early moves that hurt your color in an effort to convince opponents that you’re a different color. Thus they might later throw points your way, thinking that they’re helping out the dummy color. Of course they might be doing the same…

A more important reason to play with only two or three players is that the game will last roughly the same number of turns no matter how many are playing. With only two players, you’ll take half the turns and have much more control over potential scoring opportunities; with four players, the board can change a lot before your turn comes around again, so you’re often simply making a move and hoping for the best. To pull the most strategy from the game, stick with two players.

You can buy a clan of your own at online game retailers such as Funagain, Troll and Toad, Thought Hammer, and Game Surplus.

December 11, 2006 | (1) Comments | Permalink