First Impressions of Colony

Colony is the latest building-stuff game from Ted Alspach, the creator of Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but can it live up to either of those great games? Let’s find out…

Amongst the rubble of the nanopocalypse, one of those gimmicky sci-fi apocalypses all the other apocalypses kind of look down on, you’ll be building a fabulous colony in search of the world’s two most valuable resources: dice, and victory points. On your turn you will roll a handful of dice, taking one of them, and then activating any of the abilities of your buildings, whether gaining additional dice, manipulating the dice you have or, perhaps most importantly, wielding the construction crane to build new stuff from the central market, increasing the size of your tableau and seeing your city sprawl across the table. While you are spending your time doing this, your fellow players are passing around the rest of the dice you rolled, each taking one to add to their pool for their turn.

While you start off only getting a few dice a round, these can be stored in your warehouse for later turns. There is another type of resource though, the grey dice, that are “unstable” and need to be spent the round you receive them. If you don’t build a new card, you’ll get a token that can be traded in for one of these grey dice, letting you build up to big turns in the early game, while in the late game you’ll have an engine that rockets you towards the 20 victory point target. Hopefully. You’ll create that engine from the cards you buy, but also by upgrading existing buildings, and finding a healthy balance between these two approaches is an important consideration.

Colony feels very different to Ted Alspach’s previous “city builders”, it has a much stronger engine building element to it, let alone the “dice as resources” thing it has going on. Spotting and crafting combos from the cards available to you is very satisfying and really reminds me of Dominion. Not that there is any deck building in any way, but that open market of possibility that only ever represents a subset of all the available cards (and offering up plenty of room for future expansions too, I’m sure) is very Dominion-esque. It can also be tailored for the game you want to play, as aggressive or as peaceful as you like. Hey, it’s your post-apocalypse!

I very much enjoyed my one play of Colony! Finding combos, building my tableau, and carefully drafting dice (a mechanic I definitely enjoy) were all interesting and satisfying elements, subsumed within a smog of tension as you race your opponents to the victory point target over the course of the game. There is some luck to the dice, but it’s difficult to call after only a single play, and with the availability of mitigation right from turn 1, I never felt that I was out of control. If you like the combo creation and open market style of Dominion, this is a game you should definitely check out, particularly if you don’t enjoy deck builders, while if you liked Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig, this is a great addition to that “city-building” line that still manages to feel unique! Check it out when it gets released.