This game is one I sadly never finished, because somehow it doesn’t like my PC and crashes a bit too often, losing the save game in the process (so warning there), but what I played fascinated me.

As the post title says, you are leading a fantasy tribe roughly in the bronze age. You generate your tribe through some questions at the start of each campaign. And you have to think like a bronze age chieftain, not like a modern person. To help you with that, you have a council of advisors, one each for different topics, where you can choose who to put on which position. Different characters have different strength, personalities and weaknesses and maybe most important: alignment to a certain god of your pantheon. You better choose wisely which gods you don’t represent in your council. Tragedies happens and if a god is not represented, your tribe members are quick to put blame there and on you for failing to respect the gods.

The game is turn based on seasons, where each year has 5 seasons and you need to decide what to assign your workers to. Enemy tribes will not expect a cattle raid outside of fire season, but your harvest will suffer if you take working hands away from caring for the crop in sea season for example. And so you have to get a feeling for the year and work with it instead of against it. Each season there are also small or big things happening in your tribe and you need to make decisions how to proceed. Will you support the wronged man because his wife ran away or is that trickster that brings you cattle really to be trusted? That kind of things. There are even story lines with multiple events depending on how you decide.

The goal of the game is trying to be elected as king of Dragon Pass. In order for that to happen you need to convince the other tribes that you are the best suited: strong against your enemies, generous to your allies and being in harmony with the gods. For that last one there is a very interesting mechanic in this game: heroquests.

These are in principle recreations of stories the bards tell of glorious heroes in the past. By preparing sacrifices and sending one of your tribes members on those quests they try to gain divine knowledge and maybe even bring back some mystical artefacts. But beware, for that veil between our and the gods realms opens both ways during the recreation of the myths and it might happen that a wrong decision during the quest, because you didn’t know the full story and went underprepared, might lead to real damage or even death.

So in short: they really nailed that bronze age feeling for me. In addition with the great music, I felt catapulted back 3000 years playing this game. There is a sequel Six Ages and that one has a sequel itself Six Ages 2, but I haven’t played them yet. But I have heard good things about them also nailing that feeling of pre-antiquity history of nomad and barbarian tribes.