Circadians: First Light Review

Dice placing, resource collecting, contract filling goodness.

Circadians: First Light from Garphill Games and Renegade Games Studios has players controlling their crew and sending them out on missions to collect resources, make peace with the locals, and complete their own contracts all while managing their base. The game plays over 4 phases. In phase 1, you'll flip the current rounds event and then roll your dice and place them on your player board, behind a screen. Phase 2 is when you'll send out your ships and place them onto the various mission boards. These can get you new ships, farms, crystals, contracts, move your harvester, and more. Every space has its own requirement or cost to even get you in the door so resource management is huge with this game. You'll gather your necessary rewards and continue to phase 3. In phase 3, you'll collect all resources from your farm dice placed and from your harvester wherever it is located on the planet board. Phase 4 is cleanup. You get your dice back and set up for the next round. The game will play over 7 rounds and whoever has the most points will win the game.

The Good: This is a phenomenal resource management game. I love that your dice are essentially their own resource. If you place them on specific boards, they don't come back to you so you'll need to be sure you are planning to get more dice sooner rather than later. From my experience, you need to try and spread yourself as much as possible. Because space is so limited on the boards, you're constantly needing to shift gears and pivot to whatever is next in line. The game never felt like it was unfair with its stinginess on resources, though.

The Okay: With such limited space on the boards, and all of them having different requirements there were times that you could get completely stuck. For example, if someone takes a spot to grab a farm, you need to have two equal dice. Fine, but if you planned for the same thing you could lose out on it and need to figure out how best to spend them but if you don't have the resources to do other actions you can effectively waste a turn.

The Not So Good: Dice = randomness throughout. There are some ships that will let you add or subtract from a roll but there isn't much else you can do to modify your results meaning strategizing and planning ahead is a challenge. This may have been a me problem but almost every single turn I completely forgot what I wanted to do. There is some downtime between planning and executing so if you're a gold fish then that can be a challenge.

Final Thoughts: Circadians: First Light is a really solid game. I don't play many dice placement games because of the randomness involved and this is no exception. You need to constantly be on your toes and for the most part, the core point scoring actions are generally available to you even when others are not. It's not too difficult to get ahold of resources you need to complete your contracts. I would recommend this if you're interested in the space theme. If you're looking for something more traditional on the worker placement range, then maybe something like Dune Imperium could be a better option.

Thanks to Renegade Games and Garphill Games for providing me with a review copy.