Stats:
No. of players: 2-6
Amount of time to play: about 25 min per player
Age requirements: 13+
Set-up time: 5-10 min

Hyperborea is a fantasy-themed, 4x game that uses cubes and bag building to let you take your actions on the board.

Hyperborea Rules Description:

In Hyperborea you pull civilization cubes from your bag and place them on your player board to take actions. You gain objective tiles by having all your units on the board, getting 12 VP, or buying five advanced technologies. Once two different objective tiles have been claimed the game ends.

You play a race and each race has a unique set two of abilities they have access to. At the beginning of the game you choose one of these abilities to use for the entire game. You also start in that race’s unique homeland tile.

The actions you can take include move a unit, attack, fortify a tile, gain a unit, gain an advanced technology card, develop your civilization, or gain a VP gem. Some action spaces let you take more than one of these actions. There are also spaces on the board that let you take these actions. Any actions you gain when placing cubes or units on the board are cumulative and last until the end of your turn.

Movement actions get you movement points that you spend to move to new hexes. The amount of movement it costs to go from one tile to another is depends on the tiles’ terrain.

Attack actions work similarly and let you kill one unit in your hex for each attack point you have. Fortify tokens are removed at a cost of one attack point before a unit is killed. Fortify tokens you have placed are removed at the beginning of your next turn.

Advanced technology cards give you access to more actions and more places to put your cubes. But they come with a cost, grey cubes. Grey cubes are generally unusable and just take up space in your bag.

When you take a develop action it lets you advance a marker on your civilization track. These tracks correspond to the six colors of cubes in the game. After enough development you may move the marker back to the start of the track to gain a cube of that color. If you wait and develop a bit more you can gain two cubes.

As you discover new tiles you’ll find ruins and cities. Cities are the board spaces that give you more actions. Ghosts guard both ruins and cities. You must defeat the ghosts to gain the treasures of the ruins or to use the actions of the city. Once you clear out the ghost on one of these spot you may move into them for free to get its bonus. Units on these spaces may no longer fight or move until you reset.
You reset once your bag is empty at the end of your turn. At this time you move units out of city and ruin spaces, collect all the cubes on your player boards and advanced technology cards and put them in your bag.

After a player claims the second unique objective tile, everyone else gets one last turn. You then score VPs for units and ghosts killed, total number of non-grey cubes, number of VP gems, objective tiles, advanced technology cards and controlling hexes. The play with the most VPs wins.

Quick Review of Hyperborea:

I really want to love Hyperborea. It looks great, has lots of interesting mechanics and blends Eurogame and Ameritrash game features very well. But after playing it I have to say I just I like it. Don’t get me wrong there is a lot to like, but there are also some things to not like.

The components for this game are great. The miniatures are cool, the art is fantastic and everything is well-made and high quality. The rules are pretty good but have some grey areas. You must download and read the FAQ as that clears a good bit up and changes some rules for balance.

I like the bag building. It is fun and paying attention to what color cubes you get and how many you get is important. Getting things divisible by three is key so you won’t have turns where you pull just one or two cubes.

There are a lot of interesting interactions in this game. The unique starting tiles and abilities, the different advanced technologies available and which colored cubes to gain. They all encourage you to create an efficient combination to gain an advantage, which I find a lot of fun. I wanted to try all the different races and see what worked best to win with each.

Yet for the different ways to score and layers you can build it is pretty elegantly designed. You can explain and teach this game pretty quickly and most players will have the hang of it after just a reset or two. It is pretty impressive.

Like I said though the game is not perfect. With five or six players there can be too much downtime. Especially if someone in your group suffers from analysis paralysis. You should be grabbing cubes at the end of your turn and planning ahead but other people’s moves or the technologies available can force you to slow down and reevaluate things.

The bigger issue is balance or the lack thereof. The racial abilities are not equally effective and one race is pretty much broken. Most races have an ability that is clearly better than the other one. Making that choice obsolete. And some of the advanced technologies are much better than others. These areas just feel like they needed a bit more playtesting.

Lastly I like the idea of bag building and using your cubes to interact on the board. And the board matters. But the way the resets and free board actions work seems at odds with your cubes. What I mean is resetting gets you a bunch of free actions so why not keep a small number of cubes in your bag? This keeps you resetting more often. It is like having a small deck in a deck-builder. It doesn’t always win you the game but the game is more fun when everyone is gaining cubes and advanced technologies.

Hyperborea is still very fun. There is a bunch of good stuff going on in this game. Minus the broken racial ability it is very playable and I really enjoy it. But I wish it were more balanced. I still like Hyperborea, but I don’t love it. If the kinks get worked out maybe I still could. Some people I played with really liked it and others just thought it was ok. If you get the chance you should play this game before you buy it.

Score and synopsis: (Click here for an explanation of these review categories.)
Strategy 3 out of 6
Luck 4 out of 6
Player Interaction 5 out of 6
Replay Value 5 out of 6
Complexity 4 out of 6
Fun 5 out of 6
Overall 4 out of 6

I have played this game a ton and part of me wants to give it a 5, but there are just too many things to for it to earn a 5. If an expansion came out that balanced the factions I could definitely see that getting a 5.