Utopia: Discussion

About Utopia, from BoardGameGeek:

You control a shadowy 24th century faction, hell-bent on reordering history to set off a chain reaction which will bring about your utopian vision for the world. At your disposal is a fleet of chronoships, capable of traversing all four dimensions of space and time. You will hunt through all of history to hire the brightest minds to your cause, and each will be given command of one of your precious chronoships. However, you are not the only one with a grand vision for the future and must watch out for rivals, who will attempt to meddle with your plans! The aim of this worker placement game is to be the first to complete three Butterfly Effect Missions. These are iconic moments in history, from the rise of the Roman Empire to the Industrial Revolution, from the Second World War to the colonisation of Mars. Each Butterfly Effect Mission will require knowledge to be collected or technology to be developed. In Utopia, each player will start by drafting two crew-members to activate their first two Chronoships. These crew-members will be famous people from history or the future and each will have different primary and secondary abilities. Primary abilities enhance the collection of one of five types of knowledge: Military, Exploration, Science, Politics or Culture. Secondary abilities come in 13 varieties which will help the player to compete with their rivals, ranging from Merchants to Medics, from Spies to Superstars. It is possible to control an additional three Chronoships by recruiting new crew-members to command them. Chronoships travel through wormholes to visit different locations in space and time, known as Time Zones (TZs). There are 12 TZs in total, TZ1 represents the ancient past, whereas TZ12 represents the distant future. New Alternate TZs will also spawn throughout the game, the “Butterfly Effect” of players meddling with the space-time continuum. -description from designer