Game Daze Park Place Mall Manager Recommendation, September 2010
Drew -
The sweep of history is before you. Innovation is a new card game from the maker of Glory to Rome in which you try to attempt to collect achievements through a pretty innovative game mechanic. This game takes a little time to learn, but is pretty simple once you get into it.
The game starts with several stacks of cards numbered 1-10, representing the different ages of innovations in the game, from Prehistory to the Information age. The cards are one of 5 colors and also have several symbols on them, as well as a special ability. There are also 9 achievements, numbered 1-9 and 5 special achievements that can be won through various cards or events. A person wins is they have a certain number of achievements, depending on the number of people playing. There are also a couple of other possible end-game win conditions, but collecting achievements is the main one.
Each turn a player can do two actions and then play passes left.
Melding is simple; take a card from your hand and play it in front of you, either starting a pile of the card’s color, or placing it on top of a previous pile of that color. You are only allowed one pile of each color. Your piles make up your Board.
Drawing let’s you take a card from a pile that is the same age as the highest age among the top cards on your board. If that pile is empty, you then draw from the next highest pile. This goes for ANY time you are required to draw cards.
To Achieve is to claim an achievement if two conditions are met; you have a top card on your board of the achievements value and you have points equal to 5X the achievements value.
Dogma is the meat of the game. Each card has an action or series of actions referred to as Dogmas. You can choose to perform a Dogma of any of the top cards on your board. The symbols on your top cards will determine who you can affect with the actions. Various actions require you to have more of a specific symbol on your cards to force someone else to do the action; others let any player with an equal or higher number of symbols do the action in addition to you doing it. A game mechanic called Splaying will affect the number of symbols you have. Splaying means taking your stack of cards and sliding it in a certain direction, revealing the symbols on the cards beneath your top card and adding them to the mix of symbols you have.
As said, the endgame conditions are variable. The main one is simple, just collect a certain number of achievements. But there are some others in the cards near the end of the game that can throw a monkey-wrench in other plans.
The game moves fast if you remember all the rules, which we didn’t the first time we played. As I said, the game isn’t complicated, just complex, with the various Dogma’s mixing in fun but unpredictable ways. I see this being a game I’ll be playing quite a lot, as it have a nice balance of depth and a shorter playing time.