Essen Preview - Timespan

About Timespan, from BoardGameGeek:

Timespan is a streamlined, friendly and highly varied civilization game from the designers of Automania and Bad Company. Combine one of six asymmetric civilizations with one of six unique technology boards, and customize your civilization further by recruiting among 175 historic persons, buildings, technologies and wonders. Large parts of the game are played simultaneously, allowing you to lead your civilization from the stone age to the space age in about 90 minutes. There is no warfare: Timespan focuses on the peaceful sides of civilization building, the exploration and on building an economic engine. >>> The game is played over 5 rounds. Each round consists of an exploration phase and an action phase. In the exploration phase players take turns (in order of their positions on the harmony track) to draft cards and discovery tiles from the current age. Then, players move their camels, possibly visiting the other players' wonders for various effects and rewards. Then follows the action phase, which is played simultaneously by all players: Each player has a civilization board with a timeline, where they can play up to 4 cards. As new cards are played, older cards are pushed out of the timeline, and goes into the player's heritage. Players use their workers to activate cards in their timeline, as well as action boxes on their civilization boards and their own wonders. All activations provide various rewards such as resources or advancements on the culture track (to gain wonders and new workers), on the science track (to unlock technologies on the player's technology board), or on the ship track, the flight track or even the space track (giving access to various rare luxury resources). Luxuries can be used to upgrade your cards' effects, and when luxuries are moved into your heritage, they continue to provide permanent passive income. At the end of the second and fourth round, a new age begins, and new cards and discovery tiles are introduced to the players. -description from the designer