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What Is Colony?
The world as we know it is gone. What remains is pretty much what we expected. You’ve got your fallout shelters, generators, and roving bands of pirates. Between it all, it’s up to you to build your colony, and you’ll be doing it with the one thing that apparently survived in abundance - dice. Why dice? It makes about as much sense as a currency as bottle caps.
In Colony, you are attempting to make the buildings in a communal marketplace yours. They give you two things - short term dice generation and long term points. The former gives you more opportunities and the latter is simply how you win.
At the start of each turn, one player rolls a number of dice determined by the number of players. They’ll choose one and selection will go around the table. Depending on how large your group is, you may be guaranteed a die or you may be left out. There is strategy here as to whether you want to select the die you want or choose to deny your opponents what you figure they need. However you choose, these dice are then stored on your starting ability cards. Be careful - you can only store so many.
What Can I Do?
On your turn, you may upgrade any of your starting abilities. These include the ability to construct more in a turn, easier future upgrades, conversion of dice, and, vitally, storage. Cards you’ve purchased can also be upgraded for enhanced benefits of what their unupgraded version was. Upgraded cards always give more points and, in the case of some cards like fallout shelters, sometimes exponentially so. These upgrades will cost you dice values in certain configurations. For example, the base upgrade cost is a 1 die, a 2 die, a 3 die, and a 4 die. If you choose to do this and not purchase a card from the marketplace to build, you’ll also get some credit chips that you can cash in later for some unstable dice you can roll.
What’s an unstable die? Essentially, it’s the ghost of a normal die that you don’t get to store or keep into the next turn if you don’t spend it. Of course, what’s currently an unstable die doesn’t have to remain so…
The bulk of your turns in Colony will likely involve purchasing from the market and building. The market is set at the beginning of the game and doesn’t change except that non-basic options have much fewer instances of them and can run out. Each building has its own benefits and costs. Basic buildings will all give you a certain unstable die each turn. It might be called a GMO farm, but to you it’s a 2 value die generator. You might guess that upgrading these gets you a different kind of die as well.
Competitive, Cooperative, Bit of Both?
Where things get interesting in Colony is in the non-basic market cards. You could have cards that alter what a die is worth (Tweaker), split one die into two (Black Market), give you points for storing dice (Stockpile), protect your investments (Chain Link Fence), or allow you to raid your opponents (Pirate). Essentially, you can set up a game that’s entirely isolated in that each player is doing their own thing without much interaction, competitive in that you need to be on your guard for sabotage in addition to trying to make dice math work, or semi-cooperative in that you choose cards that open trade and hospitality between you.
The latter of these options works best with more than two players where you can make and break alliances. It’s even more interesting when combined with piracy options. Got decision fatigue? The game gives you several recommended setups to get started with.
Speaking of decision fatigue, this is definitely a game that can suffer from analysis paralysis. While each player has the time it takes others to take their turns to plan a strategy, it only takes the lack of that one die that you needed to cascade into an if I do this, I can spend these here, but then I can’t do that, and is it better to do this instead situation. This is where it can be helpful for opponents to temporarily put aside the competitive nature of the game and offer friendly, well-meaning suggestions. You can also try building a story around your colony to guide decisions that are fun and funny, if not the most strategic. Got someone nearby investing heavily in unstable uranium mines? Might be time to look into those fallout shelters.
Yes, But How Do I Win?
The score is kept on a tracker throughout the game so you can generally see where everyone stands. Interestingly, your point level can do down if you were boosting it by something temporary (storage of dice, for example) or if you elect to take advantage of a catch-up mechanic that allows you to burn a purchased card (please don’t actually burn it; they’re hard to find individually and don’t smell like sunny fields) in order to get a number of dice equal to the number of points you are behind the first player.
How will you build your colony?
