This is a draft version presently uploaded prematurely for convenience so that the testing group can provide some feedback before the finished article, at which point I'll remove this header!
We are a group of just under ten fairly avid gamers who have a particular fondness for Terra Mystica. Upon finding the new fan races we dived in pretty hard. We have completed about forty games so far with another ten or so in progress which is a long way from statistically useful but does allow for some reasonable appraisals of the races. These are my guides/reviews of the new races as they stood in early 2023 complete with the board image with which we tested them. I have rated them for power only in relative terms to each other. Five is average for the new fan factions and nothing to do with the original races. I would estimate that the weakest races from the fan factions are around the average power level of the original races without the special landscapes. Overall therefor the power level of the new stuff is all rather higher.
Key;
SH = Stronghold
TP = Trading post
Sanc = Sanctuary
2w / 7c are the power actions for two workers and seven coins respectively
f1, e2 = favour tiles represented by their cult ups
vps = victory points
Prospectors
Power 9
Complexity 2
Design 6
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Very flexible race that will perform well in most setups and without melting your brain in the process. Mostly you just focus on having a lot of money because that is typically all that limits you. Take 7c whenever it is up. Try and always have at least one TP active, the first is very efficient returns and the second is decent. Favours wise I have been leaning on getting e1 and w1 mostly although f1 and e2 are always tempting. It is a case of not needing the vps as you are getting them through your digging but being sufficiently powerful economically anyway that you might as well take the vp favours. I expect this balance to change as the race is tuned down with further balance patches.
Your temples are not as good an income as most other races so you are building them more for the favours than the economy of doing so. The SH is good and pays for itself quickly but it is a big investment. The upfront cost means you are doing little else that round. The weaker temples do incentivize earlier SH lines too I find. The digging cost reduction will more than pay you your money back if the SH is made in the first half of the game it is just slow. The activated ability on the other hand can be mental. If there are early TP rounds or races like Wisps and Changelings that seem to get a lot of early TPs out then you might just win off the back of it being overly efficient. Prospectors are doubly good in five player games where the SH ability is better and the ease of digging gives tempo on getting key locations. The high power of this race combined with the relatively flexible yet direct play style led the prospectors to be the clear front runner in our early testing. While the data supports them being the most powerful I think once the more complex powerful races are mapped out better the prospectors will not look like such a clear trump race and just one of the good races. They feel a bit like somewhere between Halflings and Darklings. Worth noting the double dig is still great for the Prospectors early as two priests can go a long way in terms of early cult bonus generation.
I think the +1vp for using a spade should probably be removed for balance reasons. The new races are in general more powerful than the old ones as it is. I also dislike the design of the SH activated ability, it is too swingy and you have no control over the performance of it directly. The 3 up in earth cult to start with is also a little swingy and unnecessary, I would be more behind it flavour wise if the SH wasn't already so swingy and the race was not so powerful!
If I were trying to improve the balance and design I would reduce the cost of the SH down to 6c4w and remove the activated ability while keeping the cost reduction on spades. I would perhaps add a vp gain to it as well if needed to offset the loss of the 1vp per golden spade. Other than the slight over tuning and the randomness of the SH activation I really like the race conceptually. Nice to have races like this in the game that operate just a little differently but well within the confines of the existing resource structure.
Time Travellers
Power 5
Complexity 3
Design 3
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Another fairly flexible race with which you are somewhat forced into playing a very standard game of Terra with by virtue of them having no special ability, just a means to accrue bonus vps. Certainly powerful but equally not all that interesting. On the one hand you have to be more of a slave to the round tiles than ever before as that it your means to abuse your race. On the other hand however you gain flexibility in that there are two things you can do to score points and so abiding to one of them lets you follow a more efficient game plan than other races trying to hit the rounds. You are ideally looking for one big pair such as a late TP or big building set of score tiles spaced one apart. This can let you have a really big turn and score 18, 20, or even 24 basic just on the round tiles. The score tiles don't always have to match either, there are some nice pairs in digging and dwelling or TP and something you upgrade it to. The SH is very powerful being effectively 10 charge income, of which 8 is the turn you make it. It also assures you have active power and not just a load sat in bowl II. Compared to a 4 charge SH on turn one you are getting 38 more total charge, or nearly three times as many. It is cute and flavoursome but hardly exciting. I don't need exciting on all the things a race does but I do need it on at least one thing. Time Travellers miss the mark on that front. It is fine having some duller races, good even for accessibility. What really put me off these guys was the change in the visuals on the round tiles. I found it off putting having them all revealed. I am sure I would get used to it but it was a surprisingly big turn off. The main turn off however was that I kept making plans then remembering that I wanted to do something else because I was on different rounds effectively. It was really annoying and messed with your head. Again, I am sure you would get better with more play but for a basic race that is not something you want as a side effect of the mechanic. This is the kind of awkwardness you might forgive a race for it were a really fun race but on a vanilla race with just a vp ability it is grating. Basic races want to be smooth and intuitive which these guys are not. I can see why you need to remove the digging score access with such a dangerously high points ceiling thanks to the racial but it further reduces options and interest in the race. It would have been far more interesting to alter and reduce the cost of digging and remove the vps for doing so.
Archivists
Power 6.5
Complexity 4
Design 5
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This is a race that fascinate me from a design perspective and I do not entirely understand the reasoning behind the choices. Inherently this race do not look all that powerful and yet they are given at least one drawback. No end of round cult bonuses is pretty punitive and not something that makes much sense. I was finding it hard to get more than a couple of gold on my pass out tiles ever and hard to get any at all on tiles I really wanted. Certainly the charge didn't compensate for the loss of the cults even with the SH ability. Also, losing the cults does not take the sting out of losing any starting bonus in the cults. So that as a start makes the race seem poor. It makes me really want to open SH else you just have a nerfed race. Oddly the earlier you make the stronghold the less gold on average the tiles will have! Not that I am sure you care when you are now taking two. It certainly isn't halving it, and nor would you care that much if it were. The SH is certainly very powerful, it can get you a lot of income early and a lot of points late but it is really hard to get two good tiles, just one is tricky. You are just a bit at the mercy of the tides of the game. If things line up and you get great tiles you can have a very smooth sailing game.
What is in fact the real power of this race is that sneaky extra worker income. That is a lot of early boost, not to mention having 7 basic on turn one. There is a blank further up the line but that is a very minor nerf to this otherwise massive buff. You are generally going to be about +4 workers up on a basic race over the course of a game thanks to the ability. It scales the right way too in terms of balance in that if things are going well it will be worth fewer extra over a normal worker income setup and if you are doing less well it will be worth more. Sadly I think this is accidental good design rather than intentional. The best part about Archivists is a subtle change to the worker income. There is a lot of feels bad about the rest of it. No one enjoys sitting there watching opponents collecting piles of money for being up in brown while you get shit even if you do happen to be up in it. The design should probably be ranked at like 3 but anything my brain gets a hold of and wants to chew over has to be credited, especially given I have no proper answers.
As far as playing these guys well, I like to SH early so I look for SH points rounds in the first couple. Beyond that I am just paying a little more attention to the pass out tiles than I normally would. A relatively simple race that just gets a passive, and seemingly random, extra income out of the SH and base worker situation. Play these as you would otherwise play a vanilla race. You need to worry less about getting to cults by any sort of deadline which is liberating even if it is a nerf. I have seen a lot of going up in digging with these guys, having those extra resources and not needing the priests as urgently all nudges you in that direction. Archivists are good at fighting for the end game scoring tiles and can be quite efficient at the cults. Being able to chose and focus and not be beholden to colours or timings lets you be more efficient in regards work to score ratios on that front. All in all Archivists play very powerfully. They get extra resources base and a lot of resources and points out of the SH. I would absolutely rate them higher on design if they were not so beholden to getting the early SH online and thus had more options about their early lines.
Djinni
Power 6
Complexity 3
Design 7
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Really good clean design here. A nice basic race with some interesting mechanics that mesh well together. A unique and suitable on theme vp scoring SH that gives you something to focus on if you want. A really cool ability to chose your starting cult track and then just a nice simple and easy to understand racial that lets you do very well out of cult rewards and occasionally some bonus points on the cult track as well. The ability to choose the starting cult helps them to avoid having too few viable setups which is great design and adds extra interest with increased options as well.
The ideal play pattern for them is getting to at least 8 on the track first giving off rewards and then swapping around so that you score all of them. This means you want setups where you can get all the tracks covered in 3 swaps, i.e. some colours next to each other. Your plan will then be about how you get to 8 and how you then abuse the bonuses. If you are getting an early couple of digs where are you digging etc. Some planning is going to go a long way but it is the kind of intuitive planning you can do should you have some experience with the basic mechanics and flow of the game already. Digs and workers tend to be most easily abused early, money starts to be better as the game goes on but by and large they are all good and can be used to kickstart a powerful game. In order to get to 8 on my first turn I am looking to take a priest tile or the 4c 1up tile, as well as the priest power action, and couple of pips from a favour. Money and workers are fine to only reach six or seven but power, digs, and priests is looking a bit weak if you only manage a single instance of the income. I wouldn't want to take a 3up tile to lock one in but I would (and have) absolutely take a 5 power priest instead of a 3 power action priest to sneak in before someone else who is looking to dump a priest into a cult, or just to get my 2nd or even 3rd in. Getting the first five up is easy with 1 priest and your starting 2 ups, it is the next three ups that are really hard. w2 can be a great way to get to 8 if the first rewards are in blue although it is still best if you can take a premium income tile or e1 instead and still get to being 8 up in the 1st cult to reward you. So, Djinni are quite simple and clean to play but there is some complexity and subtlety to their starts. Predicting who is doing what with tiles and cults and what cults those early rewards are in dictating things like your potential favour tiles. Once you have navigated that part of setup and early goal the race is nice and straight forward. I do like to get to my SH as quickly as possible once I have opened temple as the vps are good and the cost to get at them is low. Beyond these few elements I am just playing Djinni like any other basic race in the game.
Treasurers
Power 7
Complexity 8
Design 7
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These dudes are very cool and seem pretty potent. They are however sufficiently complex that I can't be too confident on how one should go about playing them or exactly how good they are. They certainly seem to have a very high ceiling. In my first game with them I had over 40 workers and 60 gold to spend over my last two turns. I didn't even take an econ favour with my round 1 temple. Not entirely sure how it all went so well! The complexity with these guys is planning, not only in what you are doing next turn precisely so that you can put the right amount in the safe, but also having a strong long game vision. You seem to do the bulk of your stuff in the last couple of turns as the momentum builds. You are much slower at the start and much more powerful and capable at the end, assuming you played the first part of the game right! You do need to get the ball rolling! Intuitively the way to go feels like with vp favours rather than economy ones. You are already a race with a good economy so you have to find things to do with that. Further to not having any inbuilt vp mechanisms, your low tempo and slow start means you will inevitably struggle to get many vps from the early, and even the midgame, scoring tiles. You want to be able to hit those last couple pretty hard so as to make up for it. As such we are looking for the more repeatable things like TPs and dwellings for the rounds five and six scoring tiles.
The SH is certainly very powerful. It feels a bit like it gives you the Enlightened SH ability as you can just stick any old power conversions into the treasury. While really nice with some of the resource power actions and towns it is a large investment for relatively little return. You are not a race that has more access to power and you will want those early digs so as to actually get a bit started. If you are blowing it all on 2w and 7c you will not have any left! That being said, 2w is still a lot better than the single dig if you have your SH out even if you are just hard digging with them at base digging rate! The basic line of play with these guys seems to be get vp favour tiles and develop early econ as much as possible while trying to maximize treasury use to then explode in the late game with insane resources. A nice midgame dump of resources from the cult track can be absolutely absurd. The old 8 workers or 18 money is quite a swing! Look to go full tech with these guys eventually. You can leave digging till the final round and still get a lot done with it. Placement will be pretty key with these guys. Due to very slow starts they are a little vulnerable to getting a bit trapped in. Make sure you have some good routes out that you expect to stay open for a while in your initial dwelling placements.
In general I like the concept and implementation. They feel powerful but tricky to play. I have no obvious suggests to make in regards design although suspect they may want a very slight down tuning. That being said, their best results all came early in testing. As we have gotten to grips better with the various races the Treasurers have fallen off a bit. I suspect they are very good at capitalizing on mistakes or opportunities that others fail to take. If you get to the end game and there is no where left to build and nothing good left to fight over having all the resources isn't going to help you very much. As such I think treasurers have the awkward scaling of being very very powerful against weaker races that cannot contest certain things and a lot less powerful against the actually powerful races. A kind of tool for extra crushing noobs and dazzling them while you do it! As far as play pattern goes the Treasurers do feel a bit like the Chaos Magicians but a more extreme version of them. They are fairly flexible but things are weighted rather differently for them in terms of timing. Due to how important early income is I found that I was taking lines so as to avoid the dud dwellings and TPs more so than I would with other races and it is already something I do try fairly hard to do in general.
Architects
Power 4
Complexity 6
Design 4
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These guys have rather underperformed. I assumed a SH ability that gave 3vp a turn and that can essentially provide a spade each turn would be a big win. They are however incredibly vulnerable and inflexible. There are very few spots on the map where you have good places to bridge too and from, especially if you then plan to branch out from there doing further digs. Good luck to anyone hoping to get six spades worth of digging out of the turn one SH. Good luck to anyone who gets one of their early key bridge to locations taken frankly... You are almost forced into building one part of your empire somewhat out of the way to ensure you do not get your one viable building line randomly wrecked by someone else. Building without buddies is obviously horrible for loads of reasons and so plenty of issues arise from that as well. In playing these guys they just feel like a heavily nerfed Selkies. The Architects would benefit from being white or the wild card colour so that they could have more flexibility in starting locations. You could just build, perhaps even transform to the colour of anything you build at the other end of a bridge! That all sounds a lot more appealing.
The game plan with these guys does seem to be very much build an early SH and abuse it for digs and vps as much as possible. Beyond that there is not too much to this race. The power for a town part of a bridge is cute and one of my favourite things about them but it isn't all that much of a bonus. When I first saw these guys on paper they sounded both fun and powerful but when it came to actually playing with them they felt restrictive. It might have been down to poor expectations but they were a lot less fun and a lot less impressive than I had imagined. Basically some cool ideas that have been executed in such a way that they play poorly. You are forced into certain positions due to colour and bridge reliance and that is the worst kind of restriction you can have in a game where placement is so crucial.
Dynion Geifr (Goatboys)
Power 8
Complexity 7
Design 8
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I love these guys as I love a lot of the mechanics here. Buildings all just being two power is quite significant and interesting just by itself! Priests converting is incredibly powerful and gives some insane options and economy potential but it also creates some very powerful tensions. It never feels efficient going up in shipping or going in cults but you just kind of have to to some degree. That makes choices interesting.
Goatboys are better at being later in the turn order to start than other races. Not only are they more likely to get a priest income tile, they are also not missing out on early power thanks to already having a 2 power value building down. This makes taking priest or digs before others nice and easy if that is your way. I do find I am just taking priests over everything, power actions, pass out tiles, town tiles, the priest just almost always looks best. Like, taking 2 workers is significantly worse than taking a priest power action! It is still worse than paying 5 for a priest in conversions and then converting it to workers. Goat boys are like any econ race and really want vp favour tiles. They are great at early town forming with any 3 buildings and a big building or just 4 dwellings. Thanks to the low effective cost of the SH you can bust out a lot of stuff early. I have had some of my most powerful first rounds with these guys. A SH, a town and a temple for example is quite achievable. Thanks to this the Goatboys do enjoy early SH and town rounds. The Sanc is pretty strong for these guys too as it lets you earn two priests a turn with relative ease. You do generally want to get to a position of two priest a turn income asap. On that note you are also taking priest town, priest power action, and often priest income tile, almost all the time early and still surprisingly often late. The shipping tile is also great for you as it is a pseudo priest gain! Early temple score and big building score will typically dictate how you are looking to get your two priest income, be it three temples or 1 temple 1 sanc.
You do find you will over worker a bit with these guys and so f1 is generally better than e2 as a favour. You also will not have TPs sitting around long as the temptation to turn them into priest making things is too great! I didn't find the extra worker cost on dwellings to be that noticeable, or really even to make much of a dent in my otherwise impressive economy. Although I felt worker heavy and with a strong economy I have not found that I want to go up in digging yet playing these guys. I am sure a big part of that is the cost feels so much more, essentially 7c4w per advance! Easy towns also helps remove the incentive to go up digging. Overall this is a fun race with lots of interesting choices and a very different feel that is still somehow quite intuitive due to it being very close to conventional Terra. A large gulf in difference was achieved here with some very minor tweaks and that is impressive design.
Conspirators
Power 2
Complexity 3
Design 3
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Not a fan of these guys. The SH ability seems cool but in practice it is very hard to get much value from it and feels a bit like a trap. Sure, you get a favour and a 2g income and should be able to wrangle a bit of charge and the odd extra bit of cult reward but a temple is generally just better. At the point you are just always opening temple they are just a race with a passive gain 2g per favour which is OK but not powerful and very dull. It changes nothing about how you play with them. The real killer is no starting cult bonuses which is a really unnecessary nerf. It really feels like these guys should get a 2up in any cult at the start like the Djinni, and perhaps another little power buff elsewhere. Even then they would still be pretty dull. The power level of the fan races is that much higher on average that these guys really feel poor. They might be less of a shambles in with the old races but that isn't really the issue. Low power level can be solved with bidding provided it isn't too far out of line, which these guys are not. The issue is just that these guys offer nothing interesting or fun. The SH isn't even that interesting once you get it going and trying to maximise it was more of a chore than a fun thing to do. They have won a game but the verdict was that they only won because they were grey and everyone else in the game managed to really shit the bed. The SH was just built late to score in a points round and mostly it was just a standard grey race. I am being overly harsh, the Conspirators 1st TP is also reasonable leading to an overall slightly better off race than average....
Chash Dallas
Power 6
Complexity 4
Design 6
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This is a subtle race I have come to appreciate. They are not as powerful as many of the new races but neither are they weak. Being green is always a buff to power level it seems which makes these guys a little better in practice than their abilities alone would afford. Chash are highly flexible thanks to their economy track. The returns from it are not great and take a long time to recuperate, and even then only if you start the upgrades early. The points are nice but I would absolutely rather have more income back than the points, perhaps even just the ability to go up in digging returned. The strength of the economy track is being able to go at your own pace, you can wait till next turn for the power action or because it is the scoring round of that thing, and instead of doing nothing while you wait you can dump resources into your economy upgrades. It makes you very happy to take no power actions turn one and get a pile of digs round two. Nice and flexible. The stronghold is also subtly strong. The income is decent and the effect lets you gain tempo on lots of power actions and maintain a higher degree of control on where your power is so that you can gain cheap late game power well into the round while still doing stuff. It also makes the 7c action the easiest thing you will ever do! A free 3c you say? Thankyou. I like playing these guys when there isn't too much tension on the digs, perhaps the tile is in and there is a race that isn't taking the dig power actions. Although your income is good and you can afford to do the old hard dig a couple of times you cannot lean on it as a strategy without the ability to go up in it and so you have to be able to get good access to the power actions so as to secure key connection and town locations that might happen to be doubles and triples. Beyond that there is not too much out of the ordinary with this race. You just want to play good efficient Terra. Do the sensible things on the scoring rounds. I would aim to fully go up the economy track by the end of the game so as to secure those points. When you go up the various stages should simply be determined based on what is going on in the game. I am mostly looking to open with temple lines and generally I will be trying to take vp scoring tiles where possible. Beyond that, pushing out early dwellings as efficiently and sensibly located as possible. Like I say good classic Terra stuff!
The Enlightened
Power 9
Complexity 8
Design 8
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These guys certainly grab the eye as they are so strikingly different in many ways and incredibly cool looking too. While the game play is a little more radical with these than most races it is still very much playing Terra and quite fun. You find yourself with a lot of options. Each round you just start with a pile of power that can efficiently do anything in the game and so you need to work what you can do with that and what looks like the best of the things you can do, which is obviously all pretty complicated. Once you have a couple of games under your belt the conversion of power into stuff starts to become more intuitive but certainly to begin with it can be somewhat tedious and daunting. In practice it is actually easier as everything is just converted into power terms but because we are used to playing with a spread of resources rather than one the change from the norm is what makes it tricky. Just like being in a foreign country and having to convert prices into your native currency all the time! The other confusing element is that the various buildings you have often wind up with differing costs or unusual incomes. Priests replacing workers for building temples and big buildings is highly significant and makes early priests really important. You cannot self generate a priest, you need to kick off with one from power or from an income tile. This is all extra important as you really don't want to be doing too much i.e. spending too much power before getting your SH out. It is one of the most compulsory SH of any race but it is at least mercifully cheap. You just have to really prioritise getting a priest, ideally second action after building a TP. If you miss the tile or the power action you are going to be buying one for 5 power and it will chafe a bit.
Once the SH is out you likely want to get a couple of rounds of double priests and throw them in the 3up cults and those tracks that are giving out early temple rewards. It is quite easy to be roughly power neutral with this line thanks the to the doubling of charge gained via cults passive. You want to leave yourself with some priests to earn as income else temples will be really awkward for you! Indeed, due to the early splurge in temples most of your other early and midgame priests will be used for going up in techs, getting 1ups in cults, or just as workers. The latter is not nearly as bad as it sounds as you are getting workers in pairs usually and being able to spend an odd number thanks to a priest conversion can let you do that lovely bit more. Once you have setup that early boost you can get on with traditional expansion of economy and all that normal Terra good stuff.
As far as towns go you usually want the ones that give you cult ups as they are also typically the most power which in turn is the most resources! Power town is also great as it is twice the usual return thanks to your SH. In much the same light it is really hard to turn down air2 as your first favour as it is effectively double the income. The Enlightened can really abuse a round 3 or 4 digging score bonus but they don't need one or anything like that. They are simply flexible and powerful enough to perform well in any sort of game setup with the odd mild perk like a round 1 big building scoring bonus being nice. They likely play better than most in 5 player relative to 4 players as the extra charge will be most welcome and the high power, high flexibility, and strong tempo all work well in their favour.
The Enlightened tend to win the cults fairly well as they are so incentivized for doing so. As their power counts for double and they are getting double charge out of the cults that scales up to be four times as good as usual and thus very worth chasing. You do not want to exile much power as you will then find yourself in a position where you are wasting charge on your income. Over 20 charge is not at all uncommon and it can be worth throwing a few gold at getting power tokens so as not to waste any. Rounds seem to start with you doing all your actions that gain charge or don't cost you any power. Then when your spending bowl is as full as can be you start doing your actual stuff. I find I am passing out late or last in a lot of my rounds with the Enlightened. While very fun and novel they are clearly over tuned. For a race this complex and different to be standing out as powerful so quickly in testing should be a bit of a warning. They likely need several tweaks to bring them into line with a suitable power level. I also think the passive and SH ability should be flipped. The SH is a necessity while the passive is just a nice powerful luxury. With the SH being a necessity your early lines are rather limited. The race is plenty powerful enough that you get to do all sorts of different lines once you have built your mandatory SH but still, it would be nice if you could temple open and then slow roll the SH investment and your priests and do that big priest dump in cults charge orgy later in the game. Offering you the reasonable choice of do you want tempo or do you want a favour. Interesting and close as things should be!
Atlanteans
Power 7
Complexity 7
Design 7
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For such a different race these are impressively well balanced. What I liked most about them was the flexibility they have at the start, which they do rather need. With just the one starting building and a necessity to connect it to most of your other buildings you cannot afford to lose some key locations. With the ability to pick up a shipping town or a power town for the locked in double dig you can be assured of some security on your first turn. You also do not need to be located near other people, not for your SH at least. Obviously the power is nice if you can but you are not forcing yourself into the deathly turn one situation of making an expensive trading post. There seem to be two main lines to open, either build up your SH to get to the shipping, then ship off, form a couple of towns not connected but that can be connected by a bridge and then bridge them in for the race bonus 2up each cult and 20vps. Alternatively isolate the SH and ship off round one and do the same but with two or three towns you then later connect in. I like going up in digging a lot with this race, it is cheaper to do and great for dealing with those awkward but needed triple digs. Because of this I favour dwelling heavy openings.
While the racial bonuses are mandatory for a competitive game they are not at all hard to achieve. It didn't even feel that hard to achieve while forming at least two extra towns (in addition to the one you start with) and then joining them in. I am not sure you need to form extra towns either to be competitive, it is nice but in no way mandatory. I did far better in the game where I ended with just three town tiles than the one in which I finished with four. In both I got all the racial bonuses but I only went up in digging in the three town game and that was far more rewarding overall. The race doesn't feel linear even though you do have this overarching plan. I quite liked the task, it was an enjoyable and rewarding quest I shall enjoy repeating more. End game scoring is not your strongest suit so look to do a reasonable amount of round, favour, tech, and cult scoring. You can compete on all of them certainly and you have some advantages in some however you also have some complications, all be it mild ones. Edge spaces is probably your best of all of them relatively and that is mostly because it has less issues than anything else. You want to amalgamate everything into at least 16 powers worth of stuff meaning this is likely to clump a lot of your stuff into a small space with few blots. That being said, 16 power is not all that much, just two towns, even f2 towns of 6 power value, when connected in to the SH is enough to get you there. The point being you have a lot of spare buildings with which you are able to splurge across the map to get distance or spots or whatever. Big building distance is the most tedious as one has to be your starting location and you probably want the other in your big clump but it is still absolutely something you can fight for. At least you don't need to build both which can be beyond plenty of people!
Wisps
Power 6
Complexity 4
Design 7
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This is a clean and simple race that looks powerful but tends to underperform. These guys can output a great economy with a slew of very cheap digs. It is not uncommon to see a couple of dwellings, a TP, and a temple in round one. The SH is very powerful offering mobility and very efficient returns in both resources and vp as well. The issue with the wisps arises in the passive TP ability. You want to place with neighbours so that you can make cheap TPs but you also want to place near spots you can sensibly dig. This limits you on placement and makes connecting an issue. The real issue however is people stealing your stuff. As you have no opportunity to lock in the dug tile with a dwelling you are just hoping no one jumps in and ruins you plan. Wisps are one of the few races that almost incentivize picking green or black next to them on the colour wheel. Digging tiles out of reach of others while also being a tile that is useful and doing so off a cheap TP is not so common. The fix to this is simply to accept a few pricier TPs in your game, 3g for a dig is not exactly a lot. I always feel like blue is a little rougher on maps, perhaps due to balancing with Mermaids and their base shipping advantage. As such I think overall being blue hurts the Wisps and is a little more awkward with their play style than you might think. I get the impression that Wisps dislike 5 player games more than most as well. Wisps get a little more out of early TP rounds than most other races but it is a fairly minor perk not worth getting too excited about.
I think they could be fairly easily fixed by either moving them to being a white race so that their snow tiles cannot be there after stolen. Or simply allowing the building of a dwelling on the TP digs immediately. Obviously if moving to white they would likely need a few small perks to compensate, the 8th dwelling giving income, the reduction in going up in digging, at a minimum. A big selling point on their design is that they were very popular. Their simplicity and directness was attractive to people who were wanting to start out their journey playing the new content.
Goblins
Power 7
Complexity 5
Design 7
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I am a big fan of these guys. They have a real elegance of design to them. It is clean, clear and simple and yet seems to have a wide array of potential uses and lines while providing some really nice tensions. Do you hold your special tiles for late in the game when you can cash them in for big returns or do you bust them early for those little edges so as to try and build up more momentum? Goblins are really flexible and feel very much like you are playing a game of Terra but they offer options all along the way. Nice options too, options that are easy to understand in terms of the game of Terra. I have seen tokens used early for a couple of power so as to access the digs and get ahead that way. I have seen them saved till late and used with the big buildings to get a huge boost in the temples. I have seen them used to great effect with TP rounds as a way to get a big chunk of cash to power through. I have seen a round one sanc into a boost up one temple for powerful early cult rewards. I have used them to get a couple of extra workers to make going up in digging a worthwhile line. I have found I use them most often for 6-8 charge thanks to having lots of dwellings. It just always seems to be what I need at the time being that power can be anything and dwellings are the thing I am generally trying to get the most of into play relative to other buildings, and indeed having more of them to do so with! The balance of what you get from the building type returns is really impressive. I would have expected one to be stand out as the most useful but it is delightfully varied.
With Goblins I am looking to form three towns and I am looking to have a fairly heavy favour game. I like to have my SH out before I form any towns too. The special tokens are just so valuable it is worth emphasising the aspects of your plan that get them for you! Beyond this you are just looking to maximise points. Fight hard for the end game scores and plan around the round scoring tiles. You are a high economy race and you have the ability to fight on tempo as well if you need. What you do not have is inbuilt scoring and so I lean towards vp favours. Ten is not unreasonable special tiles to pick up in a game and you should comfortably manage 7. Goblins may not immediately seem all that powerful but if you consider what these 7 - 10 tiles can be used for then the Goblins start to sound rather more impressive. A casual 30 ups in temples? how about 80 charge? 80 gold? Yea, that got your attention! Probably these need a slight down tuning, probably just 1 fewer stating token. Seems like the cleanest fix but it is a shame to reduce the initial options open to them. Perhaps a mild income reduction is the way to go. While a fairly simple, flexible, and forgiving race I suspect they are one of the more skill intensive races. Knowing when to pop the tokens is something you feel rather than work out and thus will favour those with a lot of Terra experience.
The Children of the Wyrm
Power 8
Complexity 3
Design 6
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I do like the design of these guys but I am not entirely sure on how it came together or makes thematic sense. There are like three good ideas and a couple more interesting ones just jammed into one race. A bit like the Goatboys are. The wording on the SH activated ability is also really excessive and should probably be simplified in any way possible. It is doing such a simple and subtle thing and yet it sounds so epic in nature. It is much more of a problem solver than something to use in it's own right. A really powerful ability in those tight 5 player games for connecting and town forming. Three towns with Children of the Wyrm is pretty easy to achieve. I would describe Children as a flex race although you are not looking to be doing anything too drastic. There is very little to be gained from early SH and so I am looking to do standard temple and dwelling rush openings. A big strength of Children is their tempo. The ability to promote two power with one exile lets you fairly consistently have your pick of the early power actions. It does also make it a bit harder to exile a big load of power so as to get it back again with your SH! A full promote when 12 power is all in bowl two will only exile 4 power and get 8 active rather than 6 for 6 and so it takes longer to spend and longer to get back to bowl 2 once spent and even then you can only exile 2 to promote another 4. This isn't a bad thing, it is perhaps there to help ward you off the trap that is an early SH. It is just surprising hoe long it takes to blow all your power even if you are trying to do so! Getting your power back isn't all that exciting as it comes in uncharged but it does give you a bit more freedom to exile and promote with reasonable abandon which is nice. Having played a lot of Gaia Project there is a comfort to being able to re-stock power tokens.
The -1vp cost on charge offered costs is pretty powerful although it is very much just happening in the background thus masking quite how strong it is. Firstly it feels like it is easily a flat 15vp each game, often more. Secondly, due to how cheap power is it encourages you to go in power rich places. This is lower risk than usual thanks to your high tempo, while being a greater rewards thanks to your cheap power. You are also able to take more power into the late game. Often you will stop taking 3 or more power in rounds 4 or 5 depending on what is going on however three charge for a single point is pretty hard to turn down. Even if you just convert that into coins for endgame points you are not much down at all when you take the bonus exile/promotion effect into account.
Buildings costing less is the least interesting feature of the race. They do not need the buff, which in practice is just a gold income buff nor does it lead to that many interesting choices. As everything upgrades through trading posts you are almost always just automatically getting the cheap side because no-one wants to make expensive TPs. Thanks to the cheap power and good tempo Wyrmboys want to be in the mix and so they will not struggle to much with making their TPs on the cheap. Dwellings are sufficiently cheap that you just don't care very much if they get the discount, you are still paying what everyone else is paying so it doesn't feel like a thing. Perhaps they should be 1w3c base and reduce by 2c, that might give a proper incentive to place dwellings next to people, but that in turn probably just makes them fiddly and tedious to play. A flexible, powerful, and forgiving race. Fun to play but feel a touch over tuned and perhaps a little messy on the design front.
The Firewalkers
Power 3
Complexity 10
Design 7
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Wow! These guys are something else. We were all convinced they were unplayably bad after, well, after just reading them frankly. Their first outing didn't help their reputation at all. Thanks to fairly fascinating design however the puzzle of how to play them so that they are not just utterly awful lodged in the mind. It simply wasn't possible that a race so bad would have gotten to this stage of testing and so there must be better ways to play them. You can't play them like a normal Terra race that is for sure, however you still feel like you are playing the game Terra and the puzzle is fun. That is a criticism I have of some of the more exotic races yet to come, that they do not feel like the puzzles you are solving are playing Terra and they were not puzzles I was enjoying. So, strap in because this is all a lot different!
These guys are all about victory point tempo and timing. You need to time almost everything to the scoring rounds. You live and die by the scoring rounds. Find yourself unable to score off the early ones and you will almost lock yourself out of doing anything. I found myself in one game going up in shipping just to get the points so that I could build on another space. It was an absolute shit show. Don't let that happen! Some planning is very much required. Ideally almost your entire game, at least loosely. Ideally you want the end game scoring tile that lines up with your SH. I am not a huge fan of digging round score tile as digs feel really bad to take as Firewalkers. They either give you 4 charge each, or the option to pay four points for that dig. That is basically the rub. Digs costing 4vp a pop, sometimes 6vp makes it real hard to compete. You sort of don't really want to compete on longest area as it costs you so much to do. Ideally you only ever want to expand the size of your empire on dwelling rounds. This means I want two of those, one early, and on a bit later on, two rounds or so. If you pickup e1 you can build yourself dwellings without having to pay vps which feels and sounds great until you realize everyone else is doing that and scoring points rather than treading water... You start pretty gimped on resources so it is very hard to kickstart your vp generating engines. The SH is costly and while important, trying to rush it will leave you economically hobbled.
Taking power is another real issue for these guys, you basically have to bottom out your vps to take anything over 1 charge, and then it will still be reduced to one charge. You therefore want to be somewhat on the fringes. Turning down juicy power all the live long day can be very depressing. Another reason you want to be more on the fringes of the action is that you really want to be building on the 4vp hexes and not the 6vp cost hexes for fairly obvious reasons! I suspect for exactly this reason Firewalkers are best with just 2 or 3 opposing home terrains and at their worst facing a full 4. I also presently feel like you need to be getting scoring favours, in part for the vp tempo they offer in allowing you to expend when you want to. And also just to make up the deficit you will build up thanks to how your race works.
So far we have really just looked at downsides and limitations, your 4vp digs, your inability to take much charge, your lack of base worker income and thus 5 worker first turn, the high cost of the SH, the importance of various scoring rounds being in specific places etc. What actually makes these guys good? Well, the SH can get you over 30vp even if built on r4. There are a lot of points to be had from it, if, sadly not income. The real power of Firewalkers is fairly well disguised. The ability to move your digging marker up the track towards your scoring marker for charge is powerful and fun. Once you have enough vp in the bag to do any immediate digging you have on the cards any other vp gains are also just free charge. Take a 9vp town in the town round? That just gave you 14 charge and likely a nice full active bowl to spend as you please. I found it very easy to have the power to take the various power actions I wanted. I was often passing out early and then often just hoovering up the 7c and 2w actions. I found exiling low was nice at it let me cycle power fast and get more active power for less cost. Especially as I never really wanted to take the double dig, meaning you don't need more than 4 power tokens. Basically focus on scoring points with this race, early, and as efficiently as possible. Then ride the momentum of that juicy charge to develop as many points scoring things as you can. End game blots scoring is the best for them by a good margin as it lines up so nicely with the SH score. Early vp tiles are better for you than anyone else, you can think of them as dig tiles or as extra charge. A relatively early town round is nice too as it is one of the best things to kickstart your vp momentum and have everything giving you plentiful charge.
The Kingdom of Ember
Power 5
Complexity 9
Design 2
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This is a race with fascinating game play that is a really cool thought experiment but that sadly doesn't translate to a good time for those playing the game. These guys do not play well with others. They also don't really seem to play Terra properly either, they play their own weird Rubik's cube affair of a game somewhere just utterly ruining the landscape for anyone else nearby. Seen a lot of people ended by the Kingdom of Ember, lots on turn one as they splurge out a load of lava and cut people off, take all their expansion spots, fully surround them, etc etc. They are a fully scary race to play against in that regard and there is little you can do to prevent it. Often they will do their turn one splurge after everyone else has passed out simply due to the slow pace at which the ability takes to use. The game with these guys is really forming as many towns as possible, on the cheap. This is done by forming a long thin town and placing the town tile to one end and then splitting that off by flowing away the tile next to it and re-using all those buildings to make another town. You can pretty easily make four towns, probably five or six if things go well to perfectly.
There are two real awkward aspects to playing these guys. The inability to fight cult tracks very well and the ability to cover much ground for connecting and end game purposes. The total lack of shipping is a mobility problem but that is minor compared to the need of connecting via bridges and direct adjacency alone. This means putting your starting dwellings out close together. It means the two "furthest apart" end game tiles are not good for you, same goes for the blots one and some! Edge pieces or don't bother competing is probably your reality. It means being careful about how you are making your towns, splitting them up and then filling the gaps up again later to reconnect. A lot of fiddly planning that is for sure.
As far as the issue with cult tracks if you are putting in priests you are not using them to dig. Assuming somehow you build exclusively on home terrain and never have to cross water then your seven priests exiled, then returned with the SH, then exiled again, will get you 14 digs which gets your to 16 built things which is pretty reasonable. You can often win end game area with 14 or 15. That however leaves you zero in cults. It is also unrealistic in as far as terrain. You are going to be doing plenty of double priest tiles. You need to for the town forming dance. Obviously these guys are significantly better in games with fewer players and fewer home terrains. It is also noteworthy that any preist put into a cult before you SH means that priest effectively cost you two digs. All told I found this was a vey dig hungry race that struggled to compete in the cults. I wanted those dig cult reward bonuses but they were hard to get to.
As far as a design suggestion for these dudes I am coming up blank. I think you need a full rework so that they cannot be so oppressive to play against early somehow. Perhaps some drip feed of priests for digging with. Certainly a lot of novelty and style points to be had here but not the kind of race I want for general playing of the game!
The Geologists
Power 7
Complexity 6
Design 7
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One of the most evenly spread of the various races in terms of how they will effect others around the colour wheel. For this I quite like them in my games as it feels really fair. Especially in five player games where someone is assured having two neighbours if standard races are all being played. Geologists have a huge tempo boost and do very well in terms of economy thanks to potentially explosive starts and little need of investments in transforming terrain. You shouldn't need to go near a dig if all goes to plan and as such expansion is more limited by your finite supply of buildings than it is anything else! For this massive perk you get several drawbacks, your base and 4th worker incomes are gone, which also means you only have 5 to play with on turn one. This in turn makes the 2w power action pretty important for you whatever line you are taking, and workers on income tiles are nice too. Early towns are really easy with Geologists however you are pretty much locked into taking shipping towns whenever you can because you have such an extortionate rate on that tech up (as an aside I think this is a bit swingy and should be fixed in some way, likely reducing the cost a little but denying unfettered access to the shipping town). The only other overt downside is not starting up in any cults but this all seems reasonable given the explosive nature of the race and their powerful economy able to compensate. As with all high econ races without any built in vp mechanisms I think you need to prioritise vp favours.
The more subtle downside I have found with playing the Geologists is the need of planning and the ability to be overly reliant on key spots. I have often found the first couple of towns very easy but then really struggled to make any more. They should probably have some way to generate spades with workers so as to help prevent them getting locked out of the game randomly. While I do really like the way they play and work with the terrains and other players I do find them a little dull. There is much in the planning, both how to do what you want, and then how to undo the mistakes you have made! Lots of income is nice but I want more interesting choices if a design is to be considered really good.
The Changelings
Power 8
Complexity 9
Design 1
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I loathe these guys and so my design rating is obviously quite biased by that. Basically these guys are super Geologists. They get better income perks, better security on lines of play and key hexes, better starting cults (than almost everyone for some reason), and cheaper shipping tech costs (back to just compared to Geologists). The only real costs they have for all these perks, basically being a normal race which never needs to dig, is a slowing of the pace at which you can get to a temple and the need of all the planning. The former is a little awkward as you do want to get e1 and you can't if three other people want it enough. This is fine, they will be hurting themselves a little to take it so early and you have easily enough raw power to compensate in other areas. You are probably building almost everything and you are probably doing a lot of it pretty quickly. I have seen a lot of 6 dwellings r1 on a dwelling round into 4 TPs the following turn on a TP round. Points favours struggle to keep up with that kind of head start on vps and economy. Certainly the race is over powered but that isn't the issue with them. If they had Geologist starting situation, costs, and incomes then they would be a whole lot closer to the mark. The issue is that playing with and against this race is not very fun. It is one thing to not be fun to play, that is why we have so many races to chose from, so we can all have options to enjoy. But being no fun to play against is a design problem. Visually they are hard to follow. Seeing where they are on a map, where there towns are, what is a town, and critically what they are able to take at what cost. At most it is costing them a single dig and the answer is usually much more than you would like it to be. Their ability to just flood the board so quickly too is horrible as they will gobble up all the single digs of the other races playing, often crippling a player inadvertantly. They are really hard to predict, they look horrible on the board, and the planning is so tedious. This is because once a building is in place that pretty much locks in where you can build certain big buildings which in turn can make town planning very awkward. You do have the pace and tempo to beat most people to most places so that is less the worry. It is much more about having the right places in time for the rounds and having neighbours there to lower costs. Fail to do this and towns beyond the first two are really hard to build and the end game scoring tile for big building separation is a nightmare. While it is doable the calculations and planning isn't fun and it doesn't feel like you are playing Terra. I have not enjoyed playing with or against them and so while as a concept they are ingenious they are not a good race in game and would remain so even if they were tuned down to a more appropriate power level.
The Snow Shaman
Power 6.5
Complexity 4
Design 5
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These guys work in practice fairly well and I was a big fan of them conceptually. Where I have gone off them a little is that I just find them a little on the dull side. You have impressive economy but you have a lower vp ceiling than any other race (due to missing tech vps) and so you are basically just trying to work that off. It makes the vp favours somewhat of a must and it makes you a bit of a slave to the round tiles. You are typically very good at all the end game scoring things with your good econ and full tech by the end game. Your SH is not something you really want out early, if I really wanted to hit an early big building round I would be looking to do so with the sanctuary. This does however help make you good at furthest apart big buildings as well as the others. If I am not making a somewhat early sanc I do quite like to get my second temple up somewhat quicker. This is for two reasons. Firstly, you are not doing lots of expansion in the early game is it is more efficient to wait a bit and do so with more tech ups under the belt. Secondly, you are not spending priests on anything other than cults tracks thanks to having the free techs. This makes you reasonably competitive on them. If however you just sit on one temple for too long your total lack of priest income will cause you to fall behind. And, having that lower vp ceiling you really do not want to be falling behind on anything. Another perk about being up in all the techs is that you will spend less gold and thus need less. It is much more about workers and having enough of them to power out those expansions later in the game once you are all teched up in digging. If you are able to squeeze in an econ favour that e2 is going to be better than f1 for you in most cases. Nice early worker bonuses from cults that you can hit hard are great too. If you are not careful about your worker count and income you can hamper your momentum and fail to have the power to push and compete on end game scores in the last few rounds.
The Snow Shaman are quite like the Treasurers in that they are very powerful late game but take a little while to power up. I will do a spot of power action / income tile / hard digging prior to being fully upgraded in digging but I will not go all out and am happy to stockpile some workers for when I do have full digging. I do like to go up digging quickly but sometimes you need to get a shipping tech up done before you can start/complete your digging else you will lose a key spot. The shipping tile can help with this. It is lest contested on r3 and having full digging and a shipping on that turn is very powerful and will likely undo and early loss of tempo and some! A round 3 or 4 digging score bonus is ideal for the Snow Shaman and can be milked for a good few vps, and more so than most other races. Early temples and TPs are good with dwellings and town scoring rounds being better later. My only criticism of the race is that they are a little boring. Just giving you the techs takes away choices and compromises you must make in normal games and on top of that forcing you to focus on vps so hard takes away a lot of agency. Another weakness of the race is that they are so bound to winning end game scoring that if they come up against other really powerful building races and end up sharing for like 3 or even 9vp or coming in the bottom half for 0 or 6 vps it is going to leave you with a fairly woeful score. Being powerful but unable to compete nearly as effectively against other powerful races is a really unusual scaling trajectory to have, and sadly not a very good one in how it plays out.
The Selkies
Power 7
Complexity 4
Design 6
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A nice solid race here. I think of these guys more as river people than I do snow people. They are a little over tuned and have consistently performed well, especially in those low scoring games where everyone gets on top of each other. The ability to build on rivers is incredibly powerful. It is spots that are guaranteed yours. This gives a massive advantage in five player where space is tight. It is also fantastic for town forming, not only making it easier to group together but also removing the need to ever use bridges. The two bonus vp you get for building a river dwelling seems excessive. I feel like these guys would be about right with that just removed.
One thing "limiting" the Selkies is the power of their SH in that you really want to get it out as soon as possible. It is a bit like a double dig each round and going up in shipping. You get to hop over the river and develop if you like which is great, lots of mobility and so forth. You also get to build on the river spots in between which is lovely too. One activation can thus lead to three new dwelling spots if you want it to. You don't have to do it across the river either which is part of the problem with the Architects, they are just so inflexible in how you can use their tools. Selkies are all about the flexibility! They are a race you can actually avoid using shipping for altogether and can connect directly if desired.
Selkies benefit from the big building tile and from a lack of digging/shipping tiles. They also like a big building round in the first couple of turns. They have good economy potential and are pretty competent at competing for longest area etc. Cults are a bit harder to compete on as it is hard getting a SH and a temple up and running early.
I like the design of these guys, they are clean, easy to understand, and play nicely. I can see them being a blue race, they do not need the added flexibility of colour choice and the hinderance of no home terrain isn't really a thing as the river is kind of all home terrain. You can build on the out edge piece of river that are in line with the most out terrain pieces even though they are not outlined on the board. A useful thing I learned about them!
