Homeworlds Pyramid Game

published 2026-05-14

by Christopher Howard

I borrowed the game Homeworlds from my sister, and I am really liking it so far.

When she lent it to me, she included a disclaimer that the game seems to be very complicated and nobody else was sure how to play it. It did take me an hour or two of studying over the little instruction manual, which does not include a lot of pictures. At first, there seems to be a lot of rules you have to learn. However, the game is not difficult to understand once you grasp the following:

how wormhole movement works
the difference between regular actions and sacrifice actions
the two possible victory conditions in connection with the player's homeworld
the "power" associated with each color

The pieces are very simple: an assortment of red, blue, yellow, and green pyramids that come in three sizes each. If a pyramid is set up on its base, it is a star. If it is on its side, it is a ship. If a ship is pointing away from you, it is your ship. If it is pointing toward you, it is your opponent's ship.

To defeat your opponent, you must either

remove all your opponents ships from his homeworld star system, or
destroy both of the stars in his homeworld

There are two ways to do this:

the "capture" power (red) can be used to convert enemy ships into your own vessels
catastrophes: if any star system has four objects of one color in it, you can declare a catastrophe and all ships and stars of that color — in that star system — are destroyed, i.e., returned back to the bank. To use this as an attack, you sacrificially throw your own ships into an enemy star system so that you can bring the color count up to the required number.

These are the powers of each color. Both ships and stars get the powers:

green: the ability to build ships
yellow: the ability to move ships between star systems, as well as discover new star systems
red: the ability to capture ships
blue: the ability to trade ships for ones that are in the bank of a different color, but same size

The wormhole ship movement mean basically you can only move ships in between star systems that do not share a star of the same size. E.g., a ship can only move from a star system with a medium sized star to one with either a large or small sized star. Since homeworlds are binary star systems, it is not possible at the beginning of the game to launch ships directly from your homeworld to your opponent's homeworld.

You get one basic action per turn, to execute the power of a ship or star in that star system. Alternatively, you can sacrifice a ship — returning it to the bank — to be able to use its power anywhere on the map. The medium and large ships can be sacrificed to gain two or three actions, respectively, allowing for powerful combo attacks.

There are a few more important details I'm not going to repeat here, like the rules for building ships from the bank, and some more details on how each of the powers work. But my quick summary describes the essence of the game mechanics. Once you understand the rules, game play becomes intuitive and fun.

Now, I don't mean to say that winning is intuitive, as the game is very dynamic and there are variety of different strategies you can target. Questions come up, such as: Should you focus on building the biggest ships, so you can do successful capture attacks? Or amass ships of a certain color, so you can engineer a catastrophe? Should you build ships at your homeworld, and then transport them to your staging bases, or should you try to build ships at the bases themselves? What powers are most useful for stars at new star systems? (E.g., a green star for building ships, or a red star for system defense?) Should you build one ship if it would allow your opponent to build a more powerful one?

I'm not sure how long a game could potentially last, but I imagine most games would take at least 30 minutes. There is a great "save" feature of the game: Since the state of the game is based entirely on the positioning of the pieces, including a turn token, it is possible to save and restore any game by simply taking a photo of the table, and putting the pieces back later in the same position.

I started playing a game with Micah a few days ago, and he seems to be really enjoying it as well. We played for about an hour, and then we had to photograph the game so we could clear the table for dinner. We played rather slowly at first because I had to stop occasionally to explain the various rules. He wants to resume the game but we haven't had a chance yet.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed