In the beginning

In the beginning is a game about guiding a people from savagery to a Bronze Age civilization. You shape a unique tribe, choose its path and explore the surrounding world, while its members develop through the work and lives you direct.

Shape your society

You guide development across five areas: genetics, inventions, culture, management and religion. Genetics can lead to new species and distinctive human races, while inventions shape technology, food gathering, tools and housing. You decide cultural practices and social values, how the tribe is governed, and what form its beliefs take, from local totem spirits to a centralized religion with large temples.

Your first community is a family group of 10–30 people. As the population grows, you need to find ways to hold society together, whether through force or persuasion. The population limit can rise only as society develops; if too many people live together without anything uniting them, they disperse.

A people that develops

You do not advance culture or technology with direct commands. These processes unfold as your people go about their lives, and every person acts as an economic unit, being born, growing up and eventually dying for various reasons. Your choices determine how people obtain and cook food, and how they divide their time between work and rest. Hunting strengthens the tribe’s hunting traditions, while frequent communication makes its members more united.

Work and survival

You distribute the tribe’s labor points among jobs and other activities, which use up its resources. Your people must produce food to avoid starvation, as well as clothing and fuel for the fire. As civilization develops, consumption rises, so you need to balance production and demand.

The results of your choices appear on the map: people sent to hunt can be seen hunting, and people assigned to work animal skins can be seen doing that work. As the tribe grows, you can send scouts to find new territory and eventually conquer new lands.

Events and the changing world

Each turn brings events and decisions, often with ethical consequences, that shape the future of your people. Their story begins with a natural disaster, and you must try to prevent another catastrophe from ending it. Over millennia, the landscape changes as forests and steppes disappear and return, and glaciers advance and recede.