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Dawn box art
2022 Ranked #16,830

Dawn

A hidden-allegiance village-building game has players contribute cards to construct prosperity and counter threats. Secretly cooperative players need enough buildings, while selfish players can profit if shared efforts fail, making help difficult to trust.

Card Game City Building Hidden Roles Hand Management

Players

2-5

Play time

25-45 min

Age

8+

Complexity

?/5

Rating

6.95

Harder to teach Highly interactive Deep strategy

Overview

At a glance

Is this game right for my group?

ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.

Teachability 2.3/5

Harder to teach

Replay value 3.9/5

High replayability

Interaction 3.6/5

Highly interactive

Player scaling 4.0/5

Scales well

Strategic depth 4.5/5

Deep strategy

See all 4 specifications

How it plays

How does it play?

Players try to build a village together. As the game goes on each player secretly chooses whether they want to go for a coop victory or a single-player win.

Core mechanisms

Key systems that shape the decisions players make.

Read the full game description

Players try to build a village together. As the game goes on each player secretly chooses whether they want to go for a coop victory or a single-player win. Set in ancient northern Europe, Dawn blends strategy with unique player dynamics. As the town is being built there are threats that players need to decide if they want to fight. In the midst of this players have to also deduce who is helping and who isn't. The game is played over the course of six rounds. Each round consists of three phases. First, players draw cards until they have nine in their hands, then they select one to put in their storehouse. During the second phase, each player plays their cards to either: perform and action (such as heal another player, or spy on a threat), try to build a building by playing a resource card face down in front of it, or try to thwart a threat by putting a card face down by those. Finally, there is the resolution phase where the cards played face down are shuffled and revealed to see if a building has been built or a threat has been thwarted. At the end of the game, it is revealed who is a coop player and who was going for a single-player victory based on the amount of treasure each player has stored in their storehouse. There needs to be thirty prosperity-points worth of buildings built for each coop player or the coop players fail. If they fail, then the player with the most treasure stored in their personal storehouse wins the game. Dawn is the next game in the Darkness four-part saga. Where Darkness represented players competing for limited resources, as they would during "dark times", Dawn represents what happens when people choose to work together. The next game, "Daylight" will be a pure coop game, and finally "Dusk" will be a legacy game. -description from designer

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Editions

Language and publisher variants currently recorded in the catalog.

Edition Year Language Publisher / Region
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Player resources

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Game and edition data

All specifications (4)

Play and group

Players
2–5
Best with
3–5
Play time
25–45 min
Age
8+
Credits and catalog connections

Credits

Designers

1
Taylor Hayward

Artists

1
Angela Rizza

Publishers

1
Green Meadow Games

Linked items

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