Natera: New Beginning

• Designer: Eric Fugere and Hugo Tremblay-Ledoux 
• Publisher: Horizon Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 35min/player 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Natera: New Beginning, you play as a sentient and intelligent animal tribe, exploring and controlling areas abandoned in a bright, post-humanity world. With the help of your unique tribe leader and your explorers, you will explore, build authority, and take control of four distinct areas. Doing so will unlock new, more powerful tiles and allow you to establish settlements to further cement your presence. Improvements with human science will unlock powerful bonuses on a tech tree. Collecting the most venture points after four seasons will prove you are the animal tribe that adapted the best to the new Natural Era.  The game includes 150+ basic and advanced exploration cards featuring discoveries, improvements, science, and forty unique specialist cards, allowing each animal tribe to navigate and explore different strategies every single game.

To set up, place the board on the table and place appropriate hidden location tiles on the appropriate spots for Tier 2 and Tier 3.  The two decks of exploration cards are shuffled and placed near the board. The blue Specialist card deck is shuffled and then a market of five cards is laid out.  Five claim tiles are placed under the time track.

The board has 5 regions, one in each corner and the central Forest region. The four corner regions have an Authority track on it and each player places one of their markers at the start of each track.  There are multiple locations in each region – though at the start of the game only the Tier 1 locations are visible.   Each region of the board has a different theme:

• Farm (yellow) – best for gathering food/resources
• City (blue) – best for scavenging Supply or getting new Exploration cards
• Forest (tan) – all types of resources are available here, but you must trade Cards for them
• Military (pink) – collect Power and manipulate Authority
• Coast (green) – best for bartering Food for other Resources

Each player takes a player board and all the bits of their player color.  There is an area in the middle of the player board for resource storage.  Players get 2 tribe cards at random, choosing one to keep.  Players get starting resources based on their Tribe mini-tile.  Players also get a Science board at random and can choose which side to play on – this is essentially a tech tree. Players place markers for Growth bonuses, getting rewards with each space covered by later Growth bonuses..

Finally, a starting hand of 6 basic (Green) exploration cards and 2 advanced (orange) exploration cards is dealt – and each player chooses to keep any 5 of those cards.

The game takes place over a year, with each of the four seasons being a round of the game.  In the action phase of the season, players will take turns doing 1 action at a time.  In the rest phase, tribes will produce resources and draw new cards.

In the action phase, players either take an action or pass out of the phase. Options are:

• Send a Tribe Leader or Explorer – send one of your workers to a location you can access (need 3+ Authority for Tier 2, 6+ Authority for Tier 3). Tribe Leaders block locations from anyone else visiting later. Do the action of the Location you visit, and also increase your Authority in the region by 1.  Once someone has 2+ Authority in a region, they take the District Disc, which then passes around Settler’s Longest Road style. If a Settlement is present at the Location, the Settlement’s owner gets the Settlement bonus as shown. 
• Play an Exploration Card – pay any one cost seen in the upper left of the card, being sure to have any red pre-requisites for the card as well. The action at the bottom of the card is now active (one time instant reward, ongoing action, activatable trade or a production reward).  The green Basic cards are easier to play (lower cost) but the orange Advanced cards also provide VPs when played.  Cards may have tags on them (icons in the bottom left) – these may be referred to by other cards as a pre-req.

• Hire a Specialist – Play a card from the market, paying the food cost in the upper left. You take the card, worth VPs as shown, and you now have an action available to you to trade Power Cells for another resource.  Refill the market.
• Use an Ability – Abilities are all marked with a large black arrow – pay the left to get what is on the right. You will find these on your player board or on played cards.  As an example, you can trade 10 Supply for a Settlement, which you place on any unoccupied location.  This allows you to collect the Settlement bonus whenever any player visits the location, and the piece will score you 3VP at game end.  Card abilities can be done multiple times per game but only once per turn.
• Discard Cards (free action) – you can discard 2 cards from their hand to get one resource of their choice.  This can be done as many times per turn as desired. Players still have to do another action
• Pass – Pass out of the phase and wait until the Rest phase

Before the end of your turn, check to see if you can place a claim marker.  Each of the four corner districts must be claimed once you have 10 Authority in them.  There are also 5 Claim tokens randomly chosen each game, and when you meed the criteria for any of them, you must place a marker there.  Each placed Claim marker is worth 7VP at the end of the game.  Each bonus can only be claimed once per game, and once placed, the Claim is never removed (i.e. if your board no longer meets the conditions for a claim, you don’t lose the Claim). Each player has 3 Claim tokens, so obviously, the maximum you can place is 3 in the game.  If you are not the first person to meet a claim’s condition, you can make a secondary claim at the end of the game for 3VP.

In the rest phase, which starts when all players have passed out of the action phase, players take back their Tribe Leader and Explorer tokens.  Resources are then produced from many places: the Tribe Mini-tile, Science Board, Improvement cards in play, District Leader discs and finally from their Tribe card.  Finally, players draw Improvement cards as shown on the round tracker.

The game ends after the conclusion of the fourth Season. Points are tallied:

• 7VP per claim token placed during the game
• 3VP per claim token which duplicates another player’s taken Claim
• 3VP per Settlement
• VP per Science Board spaces that are claimed
• VP from Specialist Cards
• VP from Exploration cards
• 7/3/1 VP for 1st/2nd/3rd on each Authority track

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with highest total authority over the four Regions on the board. 

My thoughts on the game

Natera was on my list to check out at Spiel 2025, I was definitely interested from reading the early description of the game.  Of course, as Natera is the maiden release from Horizon Games, there was a bit of trepidation as well. It did take a few months to finally get the game to the table, and man, I’m sad it took this long.  TL;DR – Natera is a fantastic game – both in gameplay as well as production.

When I first read the rules, it didn’t seem like there was much to the game.  I have three workers to use each round, and only 4 rounds – so only 12 worker placements total.  Surely the game will be over before I know it, right?!  Well, there is so much more going on.  The cards offer a huge amount of variety, and many of them provide extra actions for you to take.  You’ll earn some basic resource income at the start of each turn, and then you can churn these resources into actions and more actions over the course of the round.

Maybe you’ll spend batteries to use an ability of your specialist.  Maybe you’ll play a card that provides you a science token – which you then place on your tech tree to generate 5 knowledge tokens (enough to pay for at least another card!).  There are lots of cards that give you the action to move one of your already placed workers and then do the action of the new space (and gain more authority), etc.

The authority tracks are an intriguing aspect of the game as well,  Each of the four corner regions has a set theme, and once you get to at least 3 Authority, you unlock the Tier 2 actions in that region, and can see the very powerful Tier 3 Action at 6 Authority.  As there are a bunch of action tiles per region, the game keeps you on your toes because you don’t know what your options will be until someone unlocks them and flips over those tiles.  In addition to getting access to better actions, the 7 point VP tally for leading an authority track is a welcome addition to your endgame score total.

There can be a bit of blocking in the game because each tribe’s Leader, when placed, blocks anyone else from using that particular action space for the rest of the round.  However, there are a lot of ways to do things – whether it be other action spaces, development cards, specialist actions, tech tree bonuses, etc – that it never really feels like you’re completely screwed out of things to do.  In fact, in many of my turns, the issue is more one of trying to figure out what things I’m going to choose to do.  When you get a handful of cards, you sometimes have to sit down and think how you’re going to chain the cards together to get as many of them played as possible.

As I mentioned earlier, the actions on the board will be different in each game.  Further, each tribe comes with a different special ability, so you’ll likely be pushed in a different direction strategy wise depending on your tribe.  The claim bonus criteria and the tech tree boards also are mutable – so you’ll likely never play exactly the same game of Natera.

The components are well done.  The game is packed well with custom trays – that work well for both storage as well as in-game use.  The player boards are nice two-layered things so that your pieces fit snugly in their cutouts.  There are a bunch of icons in the game – maybe too many?!  But the double sided fold-out player aid actually seems to have them all defined for the player; so you should be able to figure out anything the game throws at you.

Games of Natera will take up much of your game night; 30-40 minutes per player is about where we are right now, and the teach will probably take at least another 30 minutes.  Again, that seems like a lot of time for just 12 worker placements, but there are so many other actions that you can take during the action phase (as well as the time it takes to think about your plan so that you do all the things in the right order.)

For me, this is admittedly at the upper edge of my personal complexity scale – but it is just the sort of optimization puzzle that I like to play.  There are LOTS of cards in the game, but it doesn’t feel like card luck plays too big of a role here – all the cards seem to do good things in the right circumstances, and in Natera, it’s a matter of choosing which cards you’re going to play out of your hand, not just waiting to draw the one card that will score you 50 points and win the game.   At the moment, Natera is one of my favorite games from Spiel 2025, and a for-sure keeper.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Alan H:  When I first heard about the game, I was very excited to play it as I like the variation of the number of cards would produce and other friends had enjoyed it. But during the game my enthusiasm waned and it went from ‘where can I buy it?’ to I’d play it again, but wouldn’t seek out a copy as there are many games that I’d rather get to the table.

Mark Jackson:  My reaction was similar to Dale’s. It does remind me of Everdell in some ways – worker placement with resource management and tableau building – but with some interesting twists and its own rhythm. I’m actually looking for a personal copy of this now. (I didn’t play the solo system, but it looks easy to manage and enjoy.)

Larry:  This is a really good game, one of the rare titles that works for both Dale and me.  It’s a very nice puzzle, with lots of options, plenty to think about, and good variety.  My 4 player game ran a bit long and I think this would play best with 3 (as is so often the case with modern, meaty games); it could also be a lot of fun with 2.  My rating falls just shy of “I love it”, as there’s almost too many cards and resources available, and too many ways of using them, to really optimize things–kind of an embarrassment of riches.  But I’m looking forward to playing this again soon and I could easily wind up raising my rating once I do.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!  Dale Y, Mark Jackson
• I like it.  Larry
• Neutral. Alan H
• Not for me…