We have the pleasure today to open Origin for playing on Board Game Arena, a game created by Andrea Mainini and published by Matagot.
Have you ever wondered about the expansion of humanity from Africa to all over the world? In Origin, you get to decide how it took place. Well, with your fellow players, that is. Starting from the cradle of humanity in the heart of Africa, you'll create villages in adjacent regions populated by tribes represented by Tribe Pawns of different characteristics: height (for speed), width (for strength), and color.
The core mechanic of the game is that to evolve (create a new village), the new Pawn must share at least two common characteristics with the Pawn he is placed next to: evolution cannot be too radical! Then existing tribes can also migrate (move to another region) near or far depending on their speed, or swap which means taking over territory controlled by another, weaker tribe. Each time a tribe gets control of a new territory, there is an associated reward depending on the territory's color. You can get cards matching the territory's color (yellow Action cards with an effect applied immediately when played, orange Permanent cards granting you some extra powers, purple Objective cards with conditions to score them) and/or Innovation tiles, necessary to play the Permanent cards. Also, you can get some Hunting and Straits tokens worth some extra points placed on the board at the start of the game.
For a more in depth overview, you can watch this video from the Dice Tower:
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Origin is an excellent game, easy to access and profound to play with lots of possibilities (please note that on BGA, it is the full version of the rules that is implemented, not the Junior version). Also, you should know that the Tribe Pawns in the physical version are just gorgeous and really fun to move! If you try and like the game, we are pretty sure that you'll want to get a box just to play with them
We'd like to thank the publisher Matagot for allowing us to host this great game here, and the developer Elena Laskava (Victoria_La on BGA) who once more made a really impressive adaptation of a great game using BGA studio. By the way, she also created as a side project a quick and easy version of the classic Battleship pen & paper game if you'd like to give it a try (Yes, it's pen & paper, but digital! That's the world we live in!
). Thanks a lot Elena for all these games!Now, time to get mankind out of Africa!
