Thea: The Awakening is one of my favorite games of all time. At its heart, Thea is a turn based strategy game with very well designed mechanics that make the game interesting to experienced 4X players, while maintaining a healthy learning curve. At its core, Thea is a game about managing a small group of villagers as they struggle to survive against escalating odds. The game casts the player as a guardian deity, awakening (hence the title of the game) after some sort of cataclysm; you will have limited powers to directly influence the world except through your villagers.

At first glance, Thea looks and feels much like a traditional hex-based 4X game. You start with a village and some units, placed in the center of a randomly generated map. Some villagers will stay in the village to produce things, like food, items, and buildings; while other villagers will be sent outwards to explore, exploit resources, and exterminate monsters. The expeditionary group will collect resources while outside and bring them back to the village, which can then be processed into better items to improve your chances of survival.
A few aspects make Thea stand out from other survival, crafting, or strategy games. These mechanics aid the game's flow and uniqueness, even whilst being random in nature.

The most notable of mechanics is Thea's approach to resolving combat and challenges. In Thea, all challenges, like fighting, diplomacy, and hunting are resolved in a card game, where your hand of cards consists of your villagers. Each villager's statistics are directly translated into the strength of the card, depending on the challenge type. In general, you will notice that certain villagers excel at certain challenges. Warriors, for example, are the mainstay of fighting challenges, while hunters are vital for hunting.

The card game itself can be fairly simple. The player and the enemy (computer) take turns placing cards on the table, in a single row, from left to right. Once all cards are placed the attack phase starts, and each card from left to right will make an attack on an adjacent enemy card (left or right, at random). This attack phase occurs twice. Cards will be hurt or killed by attacks and removed from play for the rest of the card game.

In addition to simply placing cards, both player and computer have the option to tweak cards on the table or in the opponent's hand. At the start of each round, cards are randomly split into two piles: the offense and tactical piles. Offensive cards are allowed to attack in both attack phases, while tactical cards can only attack in the second attack phase. However, tactical cards can be used to affect the battle through various skills: Confusion, Counter Offense, Counter Tactical, Shield Ally, Support Ally, and First Action. Proper usage of these abilities can sometimes turn the tide of battle.

For example, a common early challenge is fighting a Spider Queen and its 6-7 Malicious Spider minions. The Spider Queen is quite deadly and can usually kill your villagers in a single hit. The Malicious Spiders on the other hand, are easily squashed by your villagers and deal minimal damage. Due to how deadly the Spider Queen is, the player's strategy often involves trying to kill the Spider Queen before it attacks, by placing hard hitting cards in front of the Queen in the queue. However, if the enemy happens to move first (50% chance), it will often place the Spider Queen at the front of the queue. When this happens, a properly timed "First Action" or "Confusion" can spell the difference between a flawless victory, or a Pyhrric one.

When cards are hurt in fighting challenges, the amount of damage they take is directly translated into damage on your villager. In this way, cards you lose in combat will likely end up dying (permanently) outside of combat. This makes planning and tactics very important. Also, this encourages diversification of your villagers. A party full of warriors, for example, will generally have limited tactical options.

Throughout the game, fighting is the most common challenge, but becomes more and more risky as the game progresses. Over the course of the game, the world will spawn greater challenges, and hardier groups of monsters. As the number of enemies in a single fighting challenge increases, it becomes more and more likely that you will lose cards (and thereby villagers). In this way, Thea nudges the player to diversify into different types of skills. Hunting and sneaking, for example, are excellent ways of removing large groups of enemies. In non-fighting challenges, losing cards does not translate into wounds, so the tactical considerations are much more open.

Thea includes a variety of challenges that emphasize different stats on your villagers. Most villagers will excel at a subset of challenge types, but be woefully inadequate at many others. For example, warriors are great at fighting, hunting, and physical challenges. But when time comes for diplomacy or intellectual approaches, warriors will be a liability. Craftsmen are generally the opposite. There are many classes and races to discover, which each have their own specializations.

Just as important as each villager's innate stats, equipment can also make the difference in many challenges. In Thea, all items in the game can be crafted as long as you find the right materials. There are dozens of raw materials and item types, which translates into roughly 4400 different items. When you find items in adventures, you can see the materials it is made of, and make duplicates if have unlocked the proper recipe. Crafting materials generally have certain innate characteristics which makes the crafting system easy to learn. For example, using Gold in weapons or equipment will generally add bonuses to willpower and reduce weight. Using Monster Bones will give no extra bonuses, but results in hardier equipment with higher weight.

However, crafting is something that must be unlocked through the course of the game, via "research". In Thea, each crafting recipe, building blueprint, and exotic gathering resource must be unlocked via Advancement Points. Advancement points are earned throughout the game by completing events and by crafting. In the early game, most of these points will come from fighting and adventuring. But in the mid-to-late game, crafting will produce a larger share of these points. On higher difficulty settings, research is hard to come by so must be used sparingly to unlock only what is necessary.

In addition to excellent mechanics, Thea boasts an impressive collection of adventures and events which pop up randomly through the game. There are hundreds of these events with tons of branching paths. Due to how random the events are, it is rare to see the same set of events from one playthrough to another. This makes Thea more of a reactive game than a planning game. For the most part, the player is reacting to the world, adjusting to the lemons handed out by devastating setbacks (events) and making the most from overcoming these challenges. Of course, it is also easy to fail early on. But that too is a learning experience common in rouge-like games.

Thea is not a game for everyone, but I still whole heartedly recommend this game, especially for anyone looking for unique mechanics and excellent writing.