Gheos is an interesting beast. It has one of the most epic premises out there - the shaping of a planet, with entire civilizations scrambling hither, thither and yon in response to the breaking up and merging of continents - yet squeezes it into a very streamlined game that's very easy to teach and to learn. It also has the distinction of being one of the very few games which, during sessions with first time players, doesn't take 50% longer than its box says it does. The proclaimed 45-60 minutes is quite realistic, and with all the players having a few games under their belts, it'll be more like 35.

Each of the 52 triangular landscape tiles has a mixture of land and water, the water serving only to break up the land masses. All three sides of each tile have land on them, which ensures that you will never have an unplayable tile. Unprofitable, yes; unplayable, no. At the beginning of each turn, you add one of the two tiles in your hand to the world map, either bordering or replacing an existing tile. Thus, continents and islands are formed, enlarged, and altered. The modest amount of variation in terms of the tiles' physical features makes it very unlikely that you'll hear people whining "But I didn't want this one!" and even less likely that you'll see them make moves for purely aesthetic reasons (how many of you have non-gamer wives, girlfriends, and other assorted buddies who fill the holes in Carcassonne just because they're there? A show of hands, please? Yeah, I thought so.) There are three types of icons - swords (representing military strength), cups (representing wealth, as in victory points), and grain (the game's way of determining which way people migrate when their continent is split into pieces) - and three types of temples corresponding to those icons. And, there are pyramids. Pyramids. Do not let people fall into the habit of calling them "temples", "those temples", "the other temples," or anything of that nature. Temples are something completely different.

After placing your tile, and perhaps wreaking havoc with the hapless denizens of the involved continents in the process, you can either start a new civilization or take a follower in an existing one. The land of Gheos is inhabited by six diverse and dynamic peoples: the Redites, the Bluers, the Yellowons, the Greenies, the Whitese, and the Blackans. Each of them has a population cap of just five followers (cubes), which prevents the game from becoming a stagnant exercise in taking one cube of your strongest color turn after turn; instead, you must sometimes arrange for one civilization to squash another. This is achieved by manipulating the geography so that a sword-heavy continent is merged with a weaker one. You can also force a civilization to migrate onto an island, which causes them to vanish. An island is a land mass consisting of two of the smallest possible land units merged together and surrounded by water; anything larger qualifies as a continent. When a civilization disappears, all players lose their corresponding followers, which makes going all out on one color very unwise in most cases.

At this point it should be clear that there is more nastiness here than in most European (and Europeanesque) games. There is, but all nasty all the time won't work very well. Every time you cause migration or combat, which you'll generally only do if it diminishes the collective value of someone else's cube collection, you must sacrifice a cube of your own to make it happen. If you're going to make the Greenies disappear and have a single Greenie of your own, then it's hardly a sacrifice at all, but you won't always have that sort of luxury. Most of the time, it is better to create than to destroy, and the game does a pretty good job of restricting the profitability of frequent aggression.

So. There are still the two Big Questions about any game: How do you win, and when does it end? My response to the first question is to have the most points. Your response to my response is to be more specific, and that I am an anus for giving the response that I gave. My response to your response is that you can earn points by:

A) adding temples to inhabited continents and awarding X points per corresponding icon, and

B) spending one of your three scoring discs at the end of your turn; each of your cubes will generate a number of points equal to the cup icons on its home continent.

The game has a bunch of little scoring tiles instead of a track, which may not sound like a big deal, but becomes a bit of a nuisance when people constantly reach across the table to exchange four fives for a twenty and so forth. The expenditure of every scoring disc is one of two ways in which the game can end.

The other way - and now I'm addressing both Big Questions - is tied to my only significant complaint about the game.

You see, at the end of each turn, you fill your hand back up to two tiles. Mixed in with the normal tiles are eight black "Epoch" tiles which trigger a third form of scoring, based on the number of pyramids on each civilization's continent (which will very often be zero, as pyramids are rare and immune to displacement by other tiles). When a certain number of Epoch tiles is drawn - six, seven, or eight, depending on how many players there are - the game ends, regardless of how many scoring discs remain unused. The problem here is that you can draw multiple Epoch tiles in a row, ending the game very abruptly, since there's no "paced" distribution to them. Admittedly, with a grand total of 60 tiles of both types, the game can't really afford for that to be the case; but, when the game ends after ten minutes and you haven't scored a single point, that's not much consolation.

Usually, this won't happen. The 35 minute playing time I indicated earlier is based on a reasonably sustained game. Moreover, anyone smart enough to grasp the rules of the game is also smart enough to know that if he or she wins because, against all odds, all the Epoch tiles were drawn before everybody got their first turn, then he or she did not properly "win" at all. Still, the fact that the game allows this to happen is a notable strike against it. You may want to adopt house rules to regulate the frequency with which Epoch tiles can be drawn. I'm fiercely opposed to such alterations in most cases, but that's often because I don't think a game with such an undesirable element is worth the effort of fixing. Gheos is.

On a different note, I want to add that Gheos provides more bang for your buck than most games of comparable length and complexity. For an MSRP of US $24.99 you get a good number of bits with clean and elegant artwork (and check out the box! It's so cool!), instructions in three languages (English, German, and Dutch), and, most importantly, a game that offers more depth than meets the eye and has a "let's play again" quality that many others lack. My rating, for whatever it's worth, is an 8 out of 10; highly recommended.

Do you have any suggestions about how to moderate the random epoch tile problem? I was considering splitting the tiles up into stacks and dividing the epoch tiles equally among each stack. But then a smart player could know when the epoch tiles had all been drawn for that stack.

Someone else suggested that if you draw one epoch tile right after another, then to ignore it, reseed it and draw another. This might work slightly better. I suppose there is no perfect solution, randomness has its pros and cons.

The thing I've noticed about this game is that not only is every game different, but the *feel* is always different too.

You could do it this way:
let's say you want 6 stacks. Take one Epoch tile for every stack. Now mix all the rest of the tiles (including Epoch tiles) and distribute them to the 6 Epoch tiles. Then shuffle the stacks one by one.

Regarding the epoch tiles, there are two solutions that come to my mind.

1) All epoch tiles drawn in the first 3 (or any other sensible value) rounds must be reshuffled. The player draws another tile instead.

2) Each round, only one epoch tile may be drawn, and all others must be reshuffled and replaced in the fashion above.

Perhaps that would help?

Our group prefers the 'seeding' method. We use four stacks, with two epochs in each stack.

And I agree completely that needing to modify a game to make it playable is usually a bad sign, but with Gheos seems to be worth it.

I just played Gheos twice last Saturday. We may have played it wrong, but I thought the Temples were worth one point per matching symbol on the occupied continent. Whether or not anyone owned any followers for the civilization on that continent had nothing to do with Temple scoring. Did we play it wrong?

You played it right. If you add a temple to an occupied continent, you get one point for each matching icon already on the continent. Followers are irrelevant, though the continent does have to be occupied by a civilization, as you noted.

We use a bag, rather than stacks, for drawing tiles. This would make it very easy to implement any of the throw-it-back house rules for Epoch tiles: when you draw an inappropriate one, set it aside, keep drawing until you get a non-Epoch tile, then throw the rejects back in the bag and mix it a bit.

I love Gheos, but I have a small problem with the triangular tile shape: all the angles are acute, and they tend to squirt out of your fingers like watermelon seeds if you try to handle too many at once. That's why we use a bag instead of stacks.

Good review, btw,

I use the stack method too. I just stack several pieces on top of each epoch and throw them into the box.

Also, If the same person draws another epoch due to replacing the previous epoch, he just throws it back into the box and redraws until he gets a regular tile.

My friends and I really enjoy this game.

I think Gheos is perfectly playable with the standard rules, it's just that games can be wildly different depending on how the epoch tiles come out. This is not a problem with a game you play 20+ times (especially when each game is only 30-45 minutes), but if the first few times you play it have degenerate cases (e.g. the game ends after 7 turns, like in the second game I played) it can be discouraging.

Well, that's what I get for writing a review from memory instead of checking the rules. Fixed that section. And, I agree that the game as is is fine if you're going to play it a whole bunch of times.