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Ion Game Design  |  SKU: MIB-SMG33A

Greenland (Third Edition)

$51.95 CAD
This item is available for pre-order. Orders will be fulfilled in order received. We will contact you if the item is unavailable.

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Description

Designer
Publisher Sierra Madre Games
Players 1-4
Playtime 90 mins
Suggested Age 12 and up
Honors


The three players in Greenland represent the Norse (red), Tunit (green), and Thule (yellow) tribes inhabiting Greenland from the 11th to the 15th centuries.

As a tribe, you attempt to secure food, resources, and technology to increase the size of your tribe and support children, elders, and livestock while also wiping out competing species or gathering resources to collect victory points. You must work around the weather and the extinction of natural resources as well as negotiate deals to protect your wives while you decide between monotheism or polytheism. In this tableau-building game, you'll send your population out to hunt native species of Greenland — but some might not come back. (Historically, the climate turned frigid and all but the Thule (Inuit) died out.)

In the game, play takes place over six phases; all players complete each phase in turn order, then the next phase starts. Each turn is one generation. In order:

  1. Resolve events: Examples include elder deaths, animal migrations, feuds, or global cooling. If a trade ship arrives, an auction is held for its wares.
  2. Assign hunters: Hunters are assigned to hunting grounds, resource gathering, colonizing the New World, raiding other tribes for wives or animals, or promotion to an elder.
  3. Negotiate: Players can bribe others to peacefully withdraw hunters, including marrying them to their daughters. Players with a War Chief Elder can use hunters to attack others on the same card. The New World turns hostile if there are too many colonists.
  4. Resolve hunting: Roll a die for each hunter and modify it for technologies and marriages. Success can result in gaining new hunters, resources, hand cards, wives, and/or technologies. Beware, as some animals can be confused by the prey-predator relationship and your hunters might not return. Some successes let your take cards from the central play area into your hand if within hand limit.
  5. Maintain livestock: Pay to keep the animals you've already domesticated.
  6. Take elder actions: Examples include invention, domestication, proselytization, and witch-burning. If you have no elders, you can convert to monotheism.

Depending on each player's ending theistic worldview, he has a variable scoring based on successful hunts (polytheism) or resource gathering (monotheism).

Customer Reviews

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J
Jeremy Sherwood
Historical Depth & Interesting Gameplay

Greenland has wonderful historical depth, with events, tribes, animals, inventions, etc. all reflecting the real historical situation in Greenland from the 11th to the 15th centuries. Each card in the game has a small paragraph of historical information on it, in addition to the relevant game effects. The rulebook includes some interesting historical footnotes as well. The gameplay itself, though fairly abstract, puts players in positions where they will gain a better understanding of the peoples of Greenland, the situations they faced and the decisions they had to make. All in all, I love this game as a learning resource, especially since the game itself is fun. The rulebook can be confusing at first, and the game can be punishing (since it is a survival game). The core mechanism is a form of worker placement in which tribesmen are assigned to various roles/hunting grounds and dice are rolled to determine success. The components in this third edition are very good quality. (Note that the Sea Sami are included in this edition, allowing up to 4 players).