The Emperor has tasked you with founding a glorious new colony in his name! Send your steward out into the countryside, build residences, and attract colonists to this new settlement! Attracting colonists isn’t enough though — you must also educate and employ them, allowing simple farmers to progress to citizens and finally to wealthy merchants. Build embassies to establish relations with distant lands and grow your colony into one that will earn the Emperor’s favor!

The Colonists is Mayfair and Lookout Games’ latest strategy game for serious settlers. At the start of the game, players decide how many of the four eras they want to play. If you play all four, you’re in for a long, challenging strategy marathon that will be one of the deepest and richest games you’ve ever played. But, sometimes, life gets in the way and you don’t have four hours to spend playing a single game. Luckily for you, The Colonists has your back. Rather than play all four eras, you can dial in the length and complexity you want and play era 1, or eras 3-4, and so forth.

Let’s talk a bit about eras. As mentioned before, you can play between one and four eras, depending on how long of a game you want to play. But there’s more to it than that: each era introduces different rules to the game. Therefore, you might want to play eras 3-4, instead of 1-2. In addition, there are market cards, improvements, and places that vary by era. In short, the eras provide the game with a distinct feel, in addition to allowing you to adjust the length of game you want as needed and desired.

Each era is broken down into smaller time periods for ease of play. So each era consists of five years, and years broken down into half-years. Markets and Places are the heart of the game so let’s look at each in turn.

Markets are a special kind of place that both allow certain actions to be taken and aid your movement around your growing colony. Every turn you can move directly to a market and then take normal movement from there. Besides their effect on movement, markets allow players to sell certain goods for gold, take a subsidy of goods from the supply, or take a specific action. Typically, this action is a weaker version of an action that can be taken elsewhere on the board.

Places are special areas on the map that allow players to take a specific action. There are Resource Places, which allow players to take a specific good from the general supply. ‘Sustainers’ grant food or robes (or alternatively allow players to sell these for gold), ‘Builders’ allow players to construct or improve a specific building, ‘Refiners’ allow players to exchange a basic good for a finished good, and ‘Other’ for Places that don’t fit into any of the other categories.

At both Markets and Places, players will buy and sell goods to advance their strategy. There are four types of goods: Tools, Building Resources, Sustenance Goods, and Dollars. Tools are used for building. Building Resources are also used for building and include: wood, clay, and ore, which are essential in all Eras of the game, while planks, bricks, iron, and coal are refined resources used in Eras 2-4.

Sustenance Goods are required to sustain your workers: ‘food’, which is used in all Eras of the game, and ‘Robes’, which are used in Eras 2-4.

Finally, there are Dollars, which measure the overall wealth of your community. Improvements, Buildings, and Embassies all have a Dollar value. Additionally, you can sell items for Dollars. They are not spent in the game.

But, remember, the game is called The Colonists, not The Colony, so your markets, places, and goods will be worthless without workers to staff them. Acquiring and developing workers is a task that will occupy almost as much of your time as building up your colony’s infrastructure. There are three types of colonists in the game: farmers, citizens, and merchants. You will need to buy housing for each type of colonist and then find appropriate jobs for them.

There are also embassies available for players, allowing them to contact distant lands and gain special advantages, as well as increasing the value of their colonies. The Colonists features the following embassies: Alchemists, Altruists, Envoys, Industrialists, Laborers, Lords, Scholars, Storekeepers, and Traders. Some of these embassies can be built in every era of the game, while some only appear in later eras.

Each embassy provides an advantage to the player’s colony. For example, the Industrialist allows players a free opportunity to refine goods at the end of the year. The Alchemist allows you to exchange goods for different goods the moment you get them, and so on.

Players can establish relationships with foreign colonies by visiting the Diplomat and building an embassy. Later, they can gain even more benefits by upgrading their embassy.

Like all good things, your time with The Colonists will eventually come to an end and then you’ll have to determine who has won the Emperor’s favor by developing the most prosperous colony. To do this, you’ll tally the dollar value of all your buildings and permanent improvements, your colonists, and any raw currency you have in your toolbox. The player whose colony is worth the most is the winner!

About The Colonists: The Colonists was designed by Tim Puls for 1-4 players. Games take from 30-240 minutes. The suggested age range for players is 12 and up. The Colonists is due to arrive late 2016 and will retail for $90.