FAQ

Welcome to the Mitropia Gameplay FAQ. The posts on this page give answers to common questions that arise in playing the game. In some cases the answers are guidelines only and you can feel free to bend and adapt your own gameplay. If you have questions you’d like answered that don’t appear here, please feel free to email us at help@timewarp.io.

Also see the Errata and Manual corrections page.

General Questions

• How did Mitropia come into being? It took around 7years from initial idea (“a version of Go that is multiplayer”) to finished product. A fairly detailed history or the journey and motivations can be found in this Reddit Post.

• Do you have information on the original kickstarter? Yes, the page is archived here.

• Do I need to know how to play Go to play? No, definitely not. Go was part of the genesis for the idea of the game and some of the mechanics are retained, but Mitropia is very different. It can certainly be enjoyed without knowledge of Go.

Tribal Powers

• The Kerma (Yellow) Tribal power refers to getting an extra liberty. Does this mean a yellow piece next to a mountain can never be captured? No, this is not the case. The Kerma power is written as follows: “Any Warrior or group adjacent to a mountain receives a single extra liberty unless the mountain is completely surrounded by wormholes, mountains, board edges, or Warriors of any color including your own.” This means that there must still be a liberty free somewhere around the mountain for the yellow piece to be safe (assuming it has run out of its own liberties). If other players or the Kerma player themselves play in the spaces all around the mountains so there are none left, the extra liberty is taken away.

• Isn’t the Norse power very powerful on a small board? The blue / Norse power has two aspects: 1) the ability to count liberties up to two steps away from the token, not just one, 2) the ability to move the chieftain to a different group. The first power certainly gives the Norse a defensive boost on a small board in the early and mid game. However, in the later game this tends to diminish as more and more of the 2 step distant locations fill up. The second power is generally a little less useful on a small board since it is rare that you’ll end up with more than one “alive” group of Norse tokens on a small board.

• I have the original printing and the Corinthian and Trojan powers seem to be confusing, what’s wrong? The tribal logos for the two factions are unfortunately reversed in the original Kickstarter printing of the manual (see Errata), this is fixed in subsequent digital versions of the manual. For play, everything plays as expected – just use the Red and Black factions as designated on the Player Mats in the game.

• Can we play the game without using the tribal powers?: Yes, you definitely can – this is actually an easy way to start out so that you can get used to the basic mechanics. The tribal powers will still be visible on your player mats, but simply agree not to use them. None of the other game mechanics are directly depending on them.

Playmodes

• We are just two players and you suggest the small board, that seems limiting? Can we use the larger boards as well? You can certainly play with a larger board – the next size up would be the best next step, but there’s actually no reason why you can’t use bigger boards. Playtime actually won’t be any longer than if you have five players (shorter in fact since there is less procrastination!). If you want to keep the short play times… you can certainly also use wormholes and more mountains on a small board by substituting. Our recommendation is to do this in groups of five (e.g. 3 wormholes, 2 more mountains) so that you keep the number of affinity tiles equal. (I.e. swap out one grassland, one flower tile etc.). On the larger boards with more players, clearly having 3 or more players does add some interesting dynamics, but two-player games have their own more tactical/strategic feel to them. Hopefully, they will be enjoyable to you as well! Lastly, on the very largest boards, it’s possible you’ll run out of tokens of one color or another, but if that does happen you can substitute a second color at the end.