Before play, a number of boards are randomly selected from the 22 in the game and these will form the playing board for this game. Then the four shrines are placed. Each player has their own set of building tiles which are shuffled and stacked by the side of their player boards. Each player then receives a hand of landscape tiles, which depict water, forest, hills or mountains.

During each player’s turn, he can choose from 2 actions. He can either draw two new buildings from any of his facedown building stacks and place them face-up on his building board OR he may build up to 3 buildings from those face-up on his game board. A player can NEVER perform both of these actions in a single turn, as much as you would like to. This leads to tough decision making. Buildings are placed on the board by using the landscape cards, as each building has a cost to play, although some of this cost can be played by symbols on the board tiles.

However, an added twist to placing buildings is that if they are playced in a certain order, some buildings can be placed without cost. For example, a player could build his tower at the side of his fortress for free, because the tower is pointed to by the fortress on his player board.

Another nice touch is that when a player draws the last building from one of his four stacks set up at the beginning he then gets to expand the board by placing a new board tile from the stack. This is why quite often you find yourself having to decide whether to draw tiles to hopefully complete groups of buildings so they can be placed for free and perhaps empty a stack to expand the board, or whether to place buildings on the board to meet your objective of connecting two shrines together or placing all your buildings.

This is quite a gem of a game. It has clearly outlined objectives and simple game play but leaving you with some interesting decisions to make during play - and all done in about an hour's worth of game play. Review by Brian