Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Game Components

Seismic comes with:

• 80 highway tiles
• 80 road crew markers
• 1 rulebook

Highway Tiles: Thick cardboard hexes showing twisting and turning roads in bright, primary colors. Included are 14 cities which form road ends and 6 earthquake tiles, which depicts 'quakes from magnitude 1 to 6. The remaining 60 show only roads. The tiles are all easy to use, but also relatively simple.

Road Crew Cubes: Small wooden cubes in the player colors (pink, yellow, green, and orange). They're tiny and not that evocative, but you get a ton of them which you'll need.

Rulebook: A black and white rulebook in four languages.

Overall the components of Seismic are relatively average. They're good quality, but fairly simple and not particularly beautiful. However the game does also get mention in its amusing and enjoyable theming. The idea of faultlines and more dangerous building zones really comes across in the game and it's tremendously fun to see an earthquake blast away hard-built tiles.

As such Seismic receives a high "3" out of "5" for Style: average components with good theming.

The Gameplay

The object of Seismic is to put your work crews on the most valuable roads, then complete them.

Setup: The San Andresa tile is placed in the center of the board.

The six earthquakes are shuffled together with six simple road tiles, then six of those are mixed in with the rest of the road tiles (resulting in your having 0-6 earthquakes in any game, but usually 2-4).

Each player chooses a color and takes the 20 road crew members in that color.

Three tiles are placed face-up in the middle of the table to form the initial draw pile.

The Tiles. Most tiles just show roads. These are straights, loose curves, or tight curves, and there might be 1, 2, or 3 road segments on any tile. However 13 tiles (plus the starting San Andreas) instead show intersections. These tiles have 1-6 roads running into them, and end those roads. They're also each valued from +1 to +6.

Order of Play: On your turn you: draw a tile, place a tile, place a road crew.

Draw a Tile: You draw a tile, adding it to the two face-up tiles left by the last person.

Place a Tile: Then you place one of the three tiles on the board. It must edge match any tiles that it's next to, and in addition one of its roads must match up with a road on an existing tile (meaning you can't lay a tile down with only a blank-edge-to-blank-edge match).

Place a Road Crew: Finally you may optionally place one of your road crew members. You put him on one of the roads of the tile you just placed, but no other road crew may be on that road. (You could later end up with multiple road crews on the same tile if formerly distinct roads are joined.)

Earthquakes!: There's a special type of tile that can shake things up: earthquakes. If you draw an earthquake you must resolve it immediately.

To do so you start from San Andreas and count the number of tiles in each of the six lines of tiles starting from it. This counts all tiles in the line, whether there are breaks or not.

Whichever line has the most tiles in it (with the earthquake drawer chosing in the case of ties) suffers an earthquake. Starting at San Andreas a number of tiles are removed from the board equal to the magnitude of the quake.

Afterward the player who drew the earthquake gets to draw another tile and continue his turn.

Ending the Game: The game ends when all the tiles are drawn and placed. Each completed highway with an intersection at each end scores points equal to the value of each intersection plus the number of tiles in between them. For a contested highway, whichever player has the most highway workers on the road scores all the points, with ties being friendly.

Game Variants: There are a few variaqnts for play in the rulebook, my favorite of which is "The Big One", which ensures there's a huge earthquake near the end of the game. There's also lots more cool Seismic stuff including more variants and puzzles at designer Ted Alspach's website.

Relationships to Other Games

Seismic is, no doubt about it, a Carcassonne variant. Or, to be more precise, they're both edge-matching tile-laying game with majority-control scoring. The scoring in Seismic is almost identical to scoring of rivers in Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers.

At first I thought that Seismic was a simpler version of Carcassonne because there's just one type of territory, and so your choices for road crew placement are minimal. However it adds complexity on other fronts. You get to not only select a tile from a draft of three, but you might also be thinking about which tiles you want to deny your opponents. Moreso, you also have to think about those earthquakes: where they're going to strike, and how you can make sure you're not the one getting hit.

Seismic also differs in one other area. Rather than Carcassonne's simple roads, you instead have twisty, turny roads which can loop here and there and which are more reminescent of Metro (or Linie 1, or numerous other train games) than Carcassonne.

The Game Design

At heart Seismic is a pretty simple but interesting game. There's ample choice for meaningful decisions. You can try and extend your roads, try and close your roads, try and extend the fault lines most likely to impact your opponents, or purposefully deny your opponents pieces--as just some of the tactical options in the game.

The earthquake mechanism is quite clever and adds a whole new angle to the gameplay. You always have to worry about them, whether they're going to happen or not. The visceral (and visual) effect of an earthquake is quite enjoyable, as is rebuilding afterward, which all went toward my lauding the theming in the Style section.

The drawing of intersections can have a notable random effect on play. You can offset this somewhat by making sure to get into the intersections your opponent plays, but it's still a big deal. If this bothers you, Alspach has a variant on his web site to resolve this issue. (Personally, I see the issue, but think it's fine for a game of this weight.)

I'm also somewhat unconvinced by the decision to have 3 face-up tiles to draw from. I actually (accidentally) played the game both with and without and I'm not convinced it was any better with. it didn't cause any Analysis issues for myself or my opponent to have the extra tiles available, but I suspect it would for some people. In addition the 3 face-up tiles feel somewhat awkward when used with the earthquake mechanism because the tendency is for the old player to refill the pile rather than the new player to do so. This is all an entirely minor issue though, other than the fact that I think the game works fine both ways.

On the whole Seismic doesn't have quite the depth of Carcassonne, but it's definitely an amusing alternative with somewhat different gameplay in a few different areas. I've thus let it eke in an above average "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Seismic is like Carcassonne with earthquakes. It's a light, amusing game where you try and build up networks of roads, and try not to get them destroyed by the Big One. I suspect many gamers who have never seen Carcassonne will be entirely impressed and enthralled by this offering, while regular Carcassonne players will enjoy it as a change of place, because despite its similarities it still plays like a very different game.