Male Speaker: Welcome to the white glove demo of Mesopotamia. We have a special guest today, the patron of Babylon and the head of the Babylonian Pantheon of Gods Murdoch. To win Mesopotamia you must be the first player to deliver 4 offerings to Murdoch's temple. You will also need to collect mana, build huts and harvest resources. At the beginning of the game, each player has one hut and three tribes on the board. You also have two impassable volcanoes, the temple of Murdoch and tiles that let you harvest wood and stone.
Depending on the number of players the setup will vary. Check the player aid provided with the game to see all the initial tiles and pieces that are setup. You also receive a mana scale. At the beginning of the game you have no mana so place your palm on the zero space, the bar over the 4, since at the beginning of the game your maximum mana capacity is 3. Set your holy place tiles, extra huts and tribes and offering markers close to you. These will come into the game later.
There are three parts to a turn, movement, actions and harvesting mana. To begin each turn you get five movement points, you will possibly get less on your first turn based on the number of players and turn order, but afterwards you will have five movement points to work with. It costs one movement point to move one person one step to an adjacent tile. You can never step onto a volcano space and you cannot pass through the Murdoch temple space carrying any resources.
During your movement there are several things that you can do. One of them is to deliver an offering, but we will come back to that. If you step off the board into an empty space you are exploring it, draw a random tile from the remaining land tiles. If it is a volcano, you may place it on any open edge of the board and draw another tile until you draw a non-volcano. If you draw a forest or a quarry, place it underneath your tribe. Then add as many wood or stone pieces to the board as there are players. At least one piece must go on the new tile and then the others are placed one at a time on tiles of the same type. Place extra resources on the new tile.
If you draw a plain's tile simply place it underneath your tribe. You may discover no more than three non-volcano tiles on one turn. If you were in a space with wood or stone, you may pick up one piece per tribe in the space. Place the resource on top of the tribe piece. A tribe may only carry one thing at a time. You may also drop a resource at any time. You may also steal the resources, if you have more tribes in an area than another player you may take their resources and place them on top of your own tribes.
Finally you may deliver stone to the temple. If you move to the center temple with a stone, discard the stone and move your mana scale bar up one space giving you an increased capacity for mana. Discovering tiles, picking up or dropping resources and delivering stone or offerings are all free during movement. All movement points are used for actual movement.
Offering show a number, that is the amount of mana needed to deliver the offering. You will also permanently devote one tribe to the offering. Offerings come into play during the second part of your turn taking an action. There are four actions you can take, building huts, building holy places, population growth and drawing a cart. If you decide to build huts you need at least two tribes and one wood resource on a plain space that has less than two hut size. Remove the wood and place one of your huts on the space. You can never have more than two huts on any one plain space.
For anyone of the build or growth actions if more than one set of tribes and resources are available you may do the same action multiple times. When you build a hut you place one of your remaining offering tokens faced down underneath the hut. This is how offerings come into play, so you will need to build at least four huts during the game to get all of your offerings in play. To build a holy place you need two tribes one stone and a plain tile without huts or other holy places. Remove the stone and place one of your holy place tiles on the plains tile.
For population growth you need two tribes and a hut with out and offering token under it. Place a new tribe marker on the tile. Marker needs to settle down. The fourth choice of action is to draw a cart. Carts give you special actions and affects for you to use. You may only draw one cart per turn but you may play as many carts out of your hand as you wish. The third part of your turn is harvesting mana. If you have two or more tribes on an opponent's holy place gain one mana. For each one of your own holy places with at least one of your tribes on it, gain one mana.
Finally let's revisit offerings. When you build a hut, you place an offering token of your choice under the hut. One of your tribes in the same tile as the hut may pick up the offering, but you cannot carry anything else nor you may drop the offering. If you enter the center tile space during your movement phase, you must have many mana points as the token shows to deliver the token. Spend the necessary mana and place the token face up on the temple tile. The tribe is then removed from the board. Okay, this is a game where you can actually be shut out from wining if you are not careful.
You must build at least four huts to get your offerings out, you must increase your mana scale to at least seven and you need to make sure that you have enough tribes to use population growth as you loose tribes to offerings. If you are the first player to deliver all four of your offerings to the center space you win and that's how to play Mesopotamia, balance your needs and race to be the first to deliver all of your offerings. Modern leads a long walk of a short pair.
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