I've had my eye on this ever since the bru-ha-ha about the artwork. I personally think the artwork is delightful and am even now happier to say that the game is quite interesting as well.

Components
The components are all very nice. The board is well done with beautiful graphics and seems to be plenty thick. All the wooden bits are well painted and of nice colors. The inclusion of pink as a player color is a little interesting! The cards are adequate, I've seen better, but I've definitely seen a lot worse as well.

Each player has 7 family members and a small disc for the temple. There are 60 citizens in 4 different colors to represent the types of citizens of the city. You will be trying to collect these in sets as the game goes on.

Setup
At the start of the game everyone is given their 7 family member pieces and a small disc in their color, as well as 3 cards in their color. The players take turns placing a family member in any of the 7 areas on the board, until everyone has played all of the pieces. Whoever has the majority in the temple at this point, places his disc on the "I" near the temple, second place will place his on the "II", and so on. Whoever is higher in the temple will break ties. One

Gameplay
Playing this game is very easy but knowing what to do can be very difficult. There are two things you can do on a turn:

1)You MAY Move your family members. You can move 1 OR 2 family members one space, or 1 family member two spaces.
2) You MUST play a card. Either one off the top of the common deck, or one of the 3 cards in your color given to you at the start of the game.

The common cards trigger actions like:
Each player execute the power in one area you control.
Move the Prefect
Execute All Powers

The 3 cards each player has are single use only but very powerful. One of them says to execute all area powers where you are the in the majority.

As this is a area control game, the idea is to get your family members in position to have a majority when events happen in those areas.

There are 3 types of events:
1) The Prefect arrives. When the prefect arrives whoever has the majority takes a prefect favor, which acts a wild card for a citizen when trading them in for markers. In a 3-4 player game there is also a citizen as a prize for second place.

2) Citizen Event. This typically involves adding citizens to the city. Citizens are always added to the same color area as they are, except the purple priests who can be placed anywhere.

Whenever 3 citizens are in the same area of the city, whoever has the majority takes 2 of them, and second place takes 1. Even if you are the only one there you only get 2. If, when you take a citizen, you have a complete set of the 4 different colors, you must turn them in for a marker.

3) A Power Event. Every area on the board has a power. I won't describe them all but they let you do things like move your people around, turn in citizens if you have only 3, add citizens to the board, etc.

Game End
The game ends when one person reaches 5 markers. You can also shorten the game and play to 4. Whoever has the most markers wins the game.

Game Flow
Once you go through the cards once everything starts to flow pretty easily. The first few turns are spent reading the cards and understanding what they do as well as understanding what moves offer you the most advantages. Each individual turn is short and often involves all of the players.

Several of the card actions are for each player to do something, so even when it is not your turn you will find yourself taking actions that affect the game. This really helps keep you involved.

Conclusion

I enjoyed this game and look forward to playing it some more soon. There were several intriguing options available on each turn and since the game kept everyone involved you never felt like you didn't have something to do.

I posted several pictures in the gallery of our game in progress and some closeups of the pieces and board.