I love civilization building games. From Frances Tresham’s immortal and hugely influential CIVILIZATION, first published nearly thirty years ago up through the classic Sid Meier PC games and on through modern classics like MARE NOSTRUM and GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS I’ve always found the concept of gaming through eons of history while nurturing the growth and evolution of a people, nation, or species completely irresistible. There’s something special about a game that offers you the ability to experience the growth of a civilization on such an epic, sweeping scale.

Over the past several years, there has been a drive in the hobby gaming community for the development of a shorter, more compact version of this grand concept, the supposed “90 minute CIV” that somehow captures the scope and feeling of the admittedly longer and more complex games that many board gamers eschew in favor of lighter, simpler games. Of course, any given civilization building game is already engaged in abstracting and reducing huge ideas, impossible periods of time, and tremendous concepts to a playable medium so the notion of miniaturizing the Civ game any further of course results in loss of detail, spirit, and the sense of the epic that is so critical to the genre. One need only witness a board game like the disastrously abstract TEMPUS, which was met with much dead-end fanfare a few years ago, to see how there is only a finite amount of material that can be abstracted out of a Civ game before it becomes utterly meaningless. Civ games simply demand epic scopes, gigantic scales, and narrative arcs that literally cut through the ages.

With my love for proper civilization games thus defined how was I to resist Phil Eklund’s ORIGINS: HOW WE BECAME HUMAN, a game that not only offers us the tagline “each hex a thousand miles, each turn a thousand years” but also the opportunity to raise a protohuman species (such as the ubiquitous Neanderthal) from the Bicameral Era all the way up to the modern age? The idea of starting the game literally thousands of years before the insertion point of most Civ games alone suggested that something was different about ORIGINS, and when I saw that players had to track the cognitive, social, and linguistic development of their species via brain maps I realized that this was going to be something different rather than the usual tech tree climb. Beyond that, reading the rules revealed a quirky and almost counterintuitive game that incorporated a lot of seemingly vague, disconnected mechanics that would feel more at home in the controlled environs of a Eurogame than a very detailed, specific simulation. But don’t let the auctions, tightly managed economies, individual player mats, and judicious abstraction fool you into thinking that ORIGINS is a Euro-style game- it’s a brutal and unforgiving game that frowns on the poor decisions made by the weak and smiles on aggressive, “survival of the fittest” behavior—much like real life.

All of this is couched in a game that features actual anthropological terms, rules based on scientific concepts, and a design sense that wisely favors realism over balance. When a rulebook has footnotes, a works cited page, and the admonition that the rules represent the designer’s interpretation of real-world scientific and anthropological research you know you’re in for it. Fortunately for us gamers, what “it” is turns out to be something quite unique and very close to brilliant despite the academic approach. I thought that the tweed jacket scientific rigor and awkward mechanics would certainly derail any fun or excitement the game could possibly offer and I was initially disappointed that the idea and advancement cards did not seem to offer any in-game benefit or sense of narrative beyond a couple of simple effects even though everything from a fecundity increase to an advance on the metallurgy track has a specific name. “Female coyness” and “cannibalism” were two traits that wound up characterizing my Peking Man civilization in the first game.

Now, at this point in the review you’re probably expecting me to go through a brief précis of the rules, maybe give you an idea of the turn order, how some of the mechanics work, and so forth. And after writing at least twelve drafts of that paragraph, I realized that there is no way that I could make any of the intensely interconnected mechanisms make a lick of sense without simply rewriting the rulebook- everything is a function of something else, certain concepts don’t make any sense without an understanding of another one, and to compound it all there’s terms like “encephalization” and “Dansgaard-Oeschger Events” to wrestle with.

There’s plenty of other board game writers out there who are content to do just that and call it a review but I’m more interested in sharing how a game feels, if it’s any fun, and why I like it or don’t. To sum up the mechanical end of things in a very casual way, players get a number of innovation and population actions each turn with which to expand, develop, and otherwise advance their species toward an ultimate goal of having certain types of idea cards or other objectives at the end of the game which provide victory points. There are tech advances that impart better combat skills, higher stacking limits, naval capabilities, and the like as well as idea and concept cards that represent the characteristics and accomplishments of a given people. Along the way to the modern era you’ll have to domesticate animals and crops, deal with disease vectors, tussle for territory, enslave other species, learn to talk and socialize, cope with climate change and other natural disasters, and maybe even engage in a little trading and diplomacy.

I completely understand that all that seems both vague and overwhelming and that is really where I think the genius of this design lies—in balancing out the vague and overwhelming. It simply doesn’t make any sense if you look at the individual parts. The level of abstraction in some areas is much too high but in other areas it is as accurate as a board game can get. Auctioning idea cards seems strangely out of place. Population and innovation levels are directly linked for some reason. And why the hell did it take my Peking Men something like 6,000 years to recover from all the resources and effort we put into domesticating the cow? When it is broken down along particular lines, the game is a mess and some would likely argue that there’s not a game there to begin with. However, when it all comes together, everything makes sense and if you have any doubt as to why something is in the design, there are annotations to demonstrate how it makes sense.

Mr. Eklund’s attention to detail is definitely not in vain- it’s easy to see, even with just a perfunctory knowledge of anthropological, social, and cultural history how the mechanics really enumerate quite tremendous and very real concepts. The economic system, for instance, is a masterpiece of abstraction- there’s no money or currency whatsoever in the game, the overall economy of a people is gauged by the number of “Elders” a population has as part of their demography in ratio to the number of “Consumers”. “Elders” may represent a firebearer, a social concept, the guy who invented the wheel, or a new political philosophy. When you spend resources, you generally move an Elder to a producer state. In the scale of the game it makes perfect sense, just like having only a single cube to represent an entire species at the beginning of the game, but removed from the context of the game it is almost nonsense.

In play, the game is absolutely fascinating. As you progress through the eras the game depicts, you’ll likely experience “boom” periods” of growth and development as well as fallow ones where it seems like you can’t do anything other than sit and watch other players enjoy the benefit of new technologies and plundering lands that were once your own. You’ll experience dark ages as well as golden ages. There is ample conflict- simple combat rules allow for attacks, raids, and sieges- and the division of the map allows for tight neighbors and a lot of tense competition for resources and expansion. Watching the game work is a large part of the fun and in fact I would be hesitant to recommend the game to anyone who plays games for the thrill of winning or even doing well; you have to be resigned to enjoy the experience of developing a species from a protohuman intellect into a conceptual civilization all the while rolling with the punches and simply enjoying the challenge of doing the best you can despite adversity and outrageous fortune.

All that being said, ORIGINS is the kind of cracked near-masterpiece that succeeds almost in spite of itself. Arcane concepts and awkward mechanics make the game almost opaque to even veteran gamers and even after several games I still don’t feel like I have a good idea of how to play well. The first few turns can take on a fairly scripted feel, which is kind of disappointing considering how wide open the game eventually becomes. Sometimes the limitations imposed by the system have the effect of overly restricting player choices to the point where the players will say the dreaded phrase “there’s nothing I can do” even though there’s a huge menu of potential actions. The tight economy often means that bidding for idea cards is often a matter of “haves” and “have nots” in terms of Elders, which seem notoriously difficult to get in the first stages of the game. Overall, there are points where I feel like the game is simply too tightly wound for its own good, but the level of codependency between mechanics seems to demand a clockwork approach or else the whole thing could just unravel. As the game develops, a lot of the structure and formality sort of falls away and it becomes much more open as the species develop along different paths but it is kind of disconcerting that a 4-5 hour long game seems strangely on rails for the first hour or so. Patience is definitely a virtue in approaching ORIGINS.