Pax Transhumanity

If you're not a regular player of heavy modern boardgames such as Through the Ages, Food Chain Magnate, Arkwright, Barrage, &c. then I would suggest you look elsewhere. This is a very complex game, even for seasoned gamers. But it's a real treat.The Pax series of games (Pax Porfiriana, Pax Renaissance, Pax Emancipation, Pax Pamir) are a fairly unique bunch of games that recreate historical periods through the use of a card market and personal card tableaux. A turn typically consists of a couple of action during which you can purchase cards from the card rows, place tokens on cards (effectively protecting them or claiming them) and battling existing placed tokens of your opponents. The historical setting tends to create a rich, immersive experience and the gameplay has a political feel to it.Each of the Pax series games differs a little from the others but the core mechanisms tend to stay very similar. Transhumanity is different to the others in that it does not recreate an historical setting, instead it projects humanity into the near future. Instead of cards representing historical events and technologies, the cards in Pax Trans are technologies that are on the horizon of current science within several technological spheres, for example the game include the cards 'Artificial Wombs' and 'Open-Source Sexuality', amongst others.Pax Trans shuns the traditional card market of the other Pax games for a card market in which you 'syndicate' cards. This means you effectively place a token to lay claim to a card without actually taking ownership of it. This allows other players to unsettle your ownership cube through various actions, so you have to take this into account when planning your moves.The game is very hard to learn: the whole rulebook uses very specific terms for things that have to be learnt and memorised. Quite often the technicalities of terms are defined not in the main rulebook but in the glossary at then end, which can be confusing. Learning this game is effectively a case of reading the rulebook full of technical jargon on the mechanics of the game without really having any clear explanation as to why you would want to do any of the actions. There are a couple of helpful videos on YouTube that I'd urge anyone to first watch.The gameplay, however, is fantastic. Pax Pamir (2nd Edition) was one of my top releases of 2019 and this is right up there too. Pamir is a much easier game to get into, so I'd recommend that one if you've not played a Pax game before. I salute the ambition and innovation in Transhumanity though, it's a very cool game.