Altay: Dawn of Civilization is at heart a deckbuilding game, with a bit of area control mixed in. Like in many other deckbuilders, you start with 10 cards, and draw 5 cards each round. Many of those cards give you resources, which then allow you to buy more cards for your deck. What is different in Altay are cards that allow you to build settlements, and cards that allow your areas with settlements to attack neighboring areas. At the start of the game there are only neutral tokens to attack, but at some point the areas of different players will be next to each other, so they can attack each other. But as you can only do one attack per turn from the same area to the same neighbor, and the winner only gets one settlement from the loser, it isn't easy to actually conquer territory. So the area control part of the game is often not that game deciding. Still, the game board and conquest of areas improves the table presence of Altay in comparison to pure deckbuilders like Dominion.

The downside is one that is rather often the case with area control games: Scaling with player numbers. I played Altay with 4 and with 3 players, and the 4-player game in which we used the whole board was a lot more fun. With 3 players a part of the board is blocked, but that still leaves more areas for every player, and makes area control even less significant. Also, area control games often have problems with a player count of 3, due to possibility of unfun 2 vs. 1 fighting.

Altay: Dawn of Civilization is not a very complex or difficult game, and takes only about 2 hours with 4 players, less with 3. It was fun enough with 4 players, but I have doubts about the games longevity / replayability. I had the impression that already by the second game I had much optimized my strategy, and there aren't too many random elements in the game that would change future games very much. So, yeah, maybe this game isn't talked about much on YouTube because not so many people like it.

In other news, Altay is the last but one board game from my Essen 2025 loot stack. Only March of the Ants to play before I have played all the games I bought at the fair last year.