At Essen Spiel 2008 I made one impulse purchase. Uruk. Cheap enough, looked scarce, small and again cheap but seemed interesting enough.

As they promised after two weeks there were English rules available at publishers site.

Uruk is not civ-lite. Instead it is a civ-lite-lite-lite cardbased game with absolute no aggression included in the game mechanics. The players make inventions with simple card based mechanic and form villages and cities around their inventions. Inventions always give some more benefit/possibilities for you to execute your greater plan. The villages and cities then bring the most victory points at the end of the game.

The mechanic frame is simple. Each turn a player has three actions to spend from the fixed list:

1 Take an invention card (from the pool or from the top of the deck).
2 "buy" a settlement stone for a village or a city (price gets higher as the game progresses).
3 Use one invention (usually: take a resource) in your display, (you can use each invention only once / turn).
4 Replace cards in your hand/display into resources.
5 Make/replace a new invention.
6 Use an extra ability/action of an invention (few cards).

...fast, clear and functional.

Uruk's timeframe is smt. from the stone age to the invention of Astronomy, so no modern technologies, nor modern processes to harm your pre-historic gaming. There are four different levels of inventions and later inventions offer a bit better functions than earlier versions. However inventions do not improve greatly. Let's say they get refined rather than clearly improved (with an exception of a very good 4 level Ziggurat).

It is all about optimizing your resources. Inventions help you to produce more efficiently and with a good planning you are able to save your precious actions for a better process of improving your civilization.

There are total of ten random God/Disaster cards in the deck. God cards offer some (minor) benefits, (minor) catch-the-leader abilities and then disaster cards obviously halt the play progress somehow.

The effects of the most cards are bidded:
God Cards: With invention cards in hands (invention card values 1-4 count) going around until others pass.
Disaster Cards: Blind bidding with resource cubes.

The winner of the GOD card bid gets the benefit. Whe winner of the Disaster card bid avoids the negative effect.

Uruk does not try anything extra special. It offers "fillerish" 30-60 min play experince and does it reasonable good. It is not a Civ-lite game you have looked for. Instead it is just a sympathetic little optimization game which should get enough play time to justify its existence.

+ Simple and well designed mechanics offer fast paced play.
+ Easy to carry (small and light box), Easy to setup, Easy to learn.
+ Deeper than it looks.
- Cards look very scarce yet strangely sympathetic.
- There probably should have been one more "layer" in the mechanic...
- The most inventions are just further tools for resource optimization and far from original.
- God/Disaster card mechanic does not work. Nor their boring effects, Nor the catch-the-leader mechanic some of them provide.

6.5 would be the most accurate rating for this. 6 is probably too low. 7 is generous. I am in a generous mood. I give a bit inflated 7.

.mikko