Mosaic: A Story of Civilization

OnOnbasestar5.9

A game skating close to mechanical excellence that's brought down by incongruencies in its physical implementation. A digital version could alleviate most of the quality-of-life issues and would allow the silky smooth turns to truly shine. The idea is fantastic, and though the product is lacking, I would still recommend trying it out. + Abstraction of military actions and tile placement ("exploration") makes the game very approachable + Iconography and general graphic design is extremely clear + Excellent art in both the cards and board + Actions are all very clearly laid out and are simple enough to making teaching the game a breeze to new players. + Game stays within a reasonable length even when approaching max player count - The board is too big given that the area majority scoring makes up about 1/3 of the possible points. - It's also quite inconvenient to track your own pillars of civilization tags let alone other players', which I only mention because another 1/3 of the points comes from racing the other players to certain tag or production milestones. - It's difficult to distinguish any of the tiles that get placed on the board from each other. Cities, ports, towns, and wonders all are the same shape and relatively the same colors. I would have liked to have seen some more distinction there, perhaps using different wooden pieces or something. - The player aid that comes with the game is nice, but at least for the first play, it would have been even nicer for each player to get their own smaller version of the aid. - The lack of a scorepad is absolutely criminal in a game that has in-game, end-of-round, and end-game scoring. [Retail version]

RoRoggiestar7.5

not a very good 2 player game, but, still able to see the potential with more players.