Terramara
What it is
Terramara is a worker placement euro game set in the Po Valley during the Bronze Age. Each of you leads a clan and tries to make it grow: exploring new lands, building up your military strength, refining resources and turning them into artifacts, the cards that hold the whole game together.
The action spaces sit on a board that grows round after round, because each era reveals new lands with stronger actions. Spaces are contested by strength: to move in where another player already is, you need to be stronger than them, and it costs you. The chieftain, on the other hand, goes wherever he likes.
Points come from three tracks and from the cards. There’s the military track, there’s the road your caravans travel along, with outposts where you can plant your flag, and there’s the river your boat moves up, which also decides which artifacts you can build. Many cards score at the end based on what you’ve done, so you pick them to match the path you’ve taken.
How it plays
The twist is that the work areas change during the rounds. You can send a worker straight into the areas of later eras to take a stronger action, but that worker doesn’t come home at the end of the round: it stays there until that era actually arrives. So you have to pick the right moment.
And as in other games, without the right cards you’re going nowhere. You produce resources specifically to buy them: if you’re going for strength, you need the ones that reward your position on that track or let you raid without losing strength, and some make other cards cheaper. Knowing which ones are already out and which could still come up changes your strategy.
The nugget
The terramare really existed. They were Bronze Age villages scattered across the Po Valley, mostly in Emilia, lived in for a few centuries and then abandoned. The name comes from "terra marna", the rich dark soil of those mounds, which nineteenth-century farmers dug up to fertilise their fields: that’s how the remains of the villages came to light.
At our table
A fairly straightforward worker placement game, with one twist: you can send your workers ahead in time.
How long does Terramara take?
The box says 120 minutes. At our table: 100 minutes at three, 135 minutes at four.
The box
Video tutorial
Show the video tutorials 1 in Italian
Terramara - Tutorial The Real Oivalf ·YouTube
What’s your favorite Italian game?
Heavy euro or quick filler, anything goes, as long as it was born in Italy.
