Players: 2-5
Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)

The Components

Trias comes with:

• 39 hexagons
• 80 wood dinosaurs
• 44 cards
• 1 scoring track
• 1 rulebook

Hexagons: These are medium-sized hexes printed on linen-textured cardboard. The majority show one of three terrains: mountains, steppes, or forests. There’s also one south pole, which marks the center of the board, and two water hexes, which are spacers. The graphics on the front are printed in four-color, but are very plain. There’s a bit of monochromatic color and some texture appropriate for the terrain type, but that's it. Notably missing from the tiles is the one bit of information crucial for each terrain type: its herd limit. It’s pretty simple, with mountains being 2, steppes 3, and forests 4, but it would have been nice to have it on the tiles.

Wood Dinosaurs: These are about the tiniest wood pieces I’ve ever seen, which is necessary given the size of the tiles. There are 16 each in the 5 player colors: purple, red, blue, yellow, and black. They’re each carved into a little gecko-like shape (or maybe they’re meant to be a dinosaur when placed upright; we never agreed). In either case, they’ve evocative.

Cards: These are regular-card size, printed on light-to-medium cardstock. They're printed with rounded corners, but have no coating or texture. They’re full color on the front and grayscale on the back. The backs divide the cards into "1st age" and "2nd age", while the fronts depict the three different types of terrain, including a picture of the terrain hex, and also some nice artwork to go with it. There's also a meteor strike card in the 2nd age selection.

There are also 5 summary cards, one per potential player, which list all of the required and optional actions during a turn. They're not laid out very well, but having the listing is somewhat helpful.

Scoring Track: A piece of heavy cardboard with thirty dinosaur tracks on it, forming a scoring track. Printed full color, but actually fairly monochromatically sand-colored.

Rulebook: An 8-page black and white rulebook. It has a number of examples with accompanying pictures, though the pictures mysteriously list a "sudpol" rather than a "southpole". It's very lucky the examples were included because the rules are very hard to follow. I had to constantly read and reread the examples to figure out the rules, and there was one example concerning continental drift that I had to read five or six times before I could make sense of it (due to the complexity of the rules as much as anything else).

Box & Tray: The box is a small bookshelf box at the usual German quality level. There's effectively no tray. I have my dinosaurs in a baggie, my cards rubberbanded, and my tiles running free in the box.

There's also one element notably missing from the game: a board. As you'll read in The Game Play section, below, the continents slowly drift during the game. Rules require them to move further from the south pole as they do. At least 1, maybe 2, of our 4 players had problems quickly eyeballing whether one location for a hex was further away from the pole than another. In addition, as the tiles drift, they can slowly float off the imaginary grid of hexes. By the end of our game, some hexes that were supposed to be 1 hex apart from each other were more like 1.5 hexes away. A gridded board would have fixed some of these problems, though it would have placed an implicit limit on the furthest extent of drift possible. On the whole, I think it would have been a benefit, however.

Overall, Trias is one of those games who's Style is hard to rate. The components are generally high quality, and they're also aesthetically pleasing, as you lay out your Pangea, then see it slowly separate. On the other hand, the components don't do anything to make the gameplay easier, as good components should. I've already noted this issue with regard to tile labeling, to the summary cards, and to the rulebook itself. On a whole, with above average quality and below average usability, Trias earns a fully average "3" out of "5" Style rating.

The Game Play

In Trias the goal is to be the dominant dinosaur on each of the subcontinents as they break away from Pangea.

Setup: The game begins with the construction of Pangea. The south pole is placed in the center of the board, and then three rings of tiles are placed around that. Two of these tiles are water, which are later removed from the board (as all empty spaces are water).

The cards are separated in piles for "age 1" and "age 2" and each of these are shuffled. There are 30 cards in age 1 and 9 in age 2, including the game-ending meteor strike: the goal being to make the end-game variable, but within a small range. The age 1 cards are placed atop age 2, then each player draws one card from the stack.

Each player chooses a color, and in turn each player places 2 of his color's herd pieces on the board in an empty space. Then, in turn, each player places another 2 herds on an empty tile.

The game then begins.

Order of Play: In turn each player goes and takes the following actions:

1. Drift a Tile
2. Take Actions
3. Bookkeep Herds
4. Draw a Card

Drift a Tile: Continental drift is the original & innovative mechanic that makes this game. It causes the tiles to slowly separate, creating subcontinents. At the start of his turn, a player is required to drift a tile. He may either (1) play the card in his hand to drift a tile of that type -or- (2) draw the first card from the deck and immediately drift a tile of the type shown.

How Drifting Works. There are a ton of rules for how drifting works, and some of them are confusing. The first thing to keep in mind is that you're not really drifting in individual tile, which implies a tile moving to somewhere nearby. Instead you're causing a tile to sink in one place, and another tile of the same sort to rise somewhere else.

There are two rules for which tile you can drift:

• It must be adjacent the open sea.
• You must have herds on the continent with the tile.
• It can't be the south pole.

There are a number of rules for where you can drift to:

• You must drift to further from the south pole.
• The new location must border the open sea.
• You must drift to another part of the same continent; if by removing the tile you created multiple subcontinents, you must drift to one of those. You can even reconnect separated continents if you want, but this has scoring effects, discussed below.

If there is no legal drift, then you don't do one.

If you drift a tile with dinosaurs on it, they're dumped into the sea.

How Drift Scoring Works. When you drift, you may cause scoring to occur. The following criteria must be met to score:

• A new continent must be created, either separated from the South Pole or another continent.
• The drifted tile must be placed on the new continent.
• The drifted tile must not connect together two extant continents.

The last rule is the one that forced me to keep rereading the rules because the examples clearly show that if you remove a tile to create two brand new continents, but then connect those two continents together with your drift, it doesn't get scored, even though you could have scored either one individually. Even after playing, this doesn't make any aesthetic sense to me, though I think I understand what they're doing.

Scoring is simple: the player with the most herds on the new continent gets 2 points and the player with the second most gets 1. There are no rules for what to do if there is a tie, but my guess is add up the points, divide by the appropriate number of people, and round up, since that's what's done for the different scoring method used in the end game.

Take Actions: This is the core of a player's turn. He has four action points which he may spend, as he sees fit, on various actions:

• 3 points: Drift a Tile.
• 1 point: Migrate a Herd.
• 1/3 point: Rescue a Herd.
• 1 point: Reproduce a Herd.

Some of these actions are limited by "landscape tile herd limits". Quite simply you can only have a limited number of herds on each tile: 2 in mountains; 3 in steppes; or 4 in forests.

Drift a Tile. This works exactly like the mandatory drift, except no card is played; the player drifts whatever he wants, subject to the other limitations.

Migrate a Herd. Move a herd to an adjacent land tile, subject to landscape tile herd limits.

Rescue a Herd. Move a herd that has been left swimming due to continental drift to an adjacent landscape tile, subject to landscape tile herd limits.

Reproduce a Herd. Place a new herd on a landscape tile, subject to landscape tile herd limits. Each herd may only reproduce once on a turn, and newly born herds can't reproduce until the next turn.

Bookkeep Herds: After all action points are spent, a player does some bookkeeping on his herds. Any of his herds still swimming are removed from the board. In addition, any of his own herds in excess of tile limits are removed.

(Overpopulation almost never happens, because you aren't allowed to move or reproduce in excess of limits; the only possible way for it to crop up is if a tile is moved under swimming herds during continental drift, and that brings them in excess of the tile limit.)

Draw a Card: If the player played a card at the start of his turn, to drift a tile, he now draws to replace that.

Ending the Game: Somewhere in the last 9 cards, the meteor strike will be drawn. At this point, everyone gets one last turn, but they only have 2 action points and don't do a mandatory continental drift.

Afterward one final scoring round is conducted, and is scored differently than earlier rounds. Each separate continent, except the south pole continent, is scored. The majority winner gets a number of points equal to the number of tiles making up the continent, while the second place winner gets half that. Ties divide points equally, rounding up.

The winner is the person with the most points from this and the earlier scoring.

Relationships to Other Games

Trias (2002) is a fairly classic majority based area-control game. I've played and reviewed a lot of them this year, including El Grande (1995) , San Marco (2001), and Mammoth Hunters (2003). Trias feels a bit awkward compared to those; it's not nearly as elegant. However, its continental drift mechanics, which are constantly changing the game board, are very innovative and make the game feel quite different from its other majority brethren.

Trias is also a classic action-point game. This means that players get a specific number of points which they can use for many different possible actions during a turn. Wolfgang Kramer has written many of the classics in the genre, including Java (2000), Tikal (1999), Mexica (2002), and Torres (1999). Some more recent action-point offerings allow clever ways to save action points from one turn to another, such as Hansa (2004) and to a certain extent La Strata (2004), though the last is really more limited than most action-point games.

In sum, I'd guess that Trias was influenced by the works of Wolfgang Kramer, since he's the author of the foundational majority-control and action-point games.

The Game Design

Trias is an enjoyable little game. Here's some of the better features:

Continental Drift Original: The idea of moving around bits of the map is enjoyable and creates a very dynamic game. It's also a great simulation of continental drift.

Nice Puzzle Aspects: The various possible movements of dinosaur herds and landscape tiles creates a nice little puzzle. You have to give real thought to the results that you want, and doing so is a lot of fun.

Good Strategy: Hand-in-hand with this is the fact that you can consider serious strategy, and have that strategy be well-supported by the game system.

Here's some of the games flaws:

Continental Drift Overly Complex: All the rules for where you can and can't drift are quite complex. The rules for scoring are even worse, including the mystifying exception for scoring that doesn't make sense even after playing. Careful attention to simplifying this system could have vastly improved the game.

Scoring Awkward: The scoring is awkward for two reasons. First, it's somewhat opaque. It's hard to really see who's winning until the game is over. Second, I don't like the fact that scores are calculated differently in- and out-of-game. A unified scoring system would have made for a better game; many other games have managed such, even while increasing the value of the scoring at the endgame.

Overall, Trias felt like it had fairly average gameplay for its genre, with some really neat innovations on top of that, all partially obscured by rules with rough edges. On the whole I give it an above average Substance rating: "4" out of "5".

Conclusion

If you like majority control games, and are looking for something new, this is a great choice. Ditto, it's a good game if you like to see what's new and innovative in the field.

I'd be less inclined to suggest it to more casual players, because it depends on serious strategy and also has some rough edges to the rules and gameplay.