Khôra: Rise of an Empire Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Khôra: Rise of an Empire, an action optimization euro game published by IELLO Games. In Khôra: Rise of an Empire, players control an ancient civilization and must use dice as workers to advance their empire.

I have an old friend who lives in Zurich, but last Saturday, out of the blue he showed up saying he’d been in town for work and had the afternoon free. So we dove into a game neither of us had ever played, learning it old-school style by reading the rules together as we set it up.

Thus began our exploration of Khôra: Rise of an Empire, an economic game of simultaneous action selection and dice (worker) placement for 2 to 4 players.

Players first randomly choose a Greek city-state, each of which plays distinctly based on different starting conditions. Then they play 9 rounds where each player will roll 2 (or potentially 3) dice which function as workers that take actions, with higher die rolls allowing stronger worker actions. After the actions, players resolve a common event revealed at the start of the round. They then pay to advance their city-state’s progress on one of three key measures (economy, culture, or military) if they can afford to. Finally, they check to see if anyone has scored an achievement, which in turn can grant tax or glory benefits. After the 9th round, players tally final scores with the highest winning.

The heart of the game is the action selection phase, which is where all the interlocking puzzly bits of Khôra come into play. Everything you want to do is stronger if you do something else first, but that “something else” would work better if you did the first thing first, and so on. Figuring out the best path through that contingency thicket is what makes the game a fun challenge.

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