At the center is the Ziggurat, where you must bring 4 sacrifice tokens to win. But to deliver them, you must have sufficient Mana reserved by praying in temples, which players build. You bring your sacrifices from 4 huts that you build, and you can breed at an empty hut to increase your people. To build huts, temples, and Mana, you use rocks and timber that you collect from quarries and forests.
Each turn, you can move 5 places, placing new tiles if you go off the map, seeding stones or timber if they are quarries or forests, and carrying resource to empty plains if you want to build. Building a hut or temple, breeding, or drawing an action card ends your turn, and you bank Mana if you have people on temples. So gradually, you build up your clan and have them do different things. Some stand at temples to pray, some explore and carry resource, others help build or breed. And when you deliver a sacrifice, you kill the messenger too, thus needing to breed more.
Expanded By
Mesopotamia: Expansion
- Historical theme at the time of release
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Tableau Building — Player actions and outcomes form asymmetrical results.
- tableau-building — Player actions and outcomes form asymmetrical results.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Cash and Guns is such an excellent game.
- I think it's the last game they made and it just wasn't very good.
- Beasty Bar Down Under... five out of 10.
- Aridia. One of my favorite, probably my favorite adventure dungeon crawl style game. A 10 out of 10.