In the game, play takes place over six phases; all players complete each phase in turn order, then the next phase starts. Each turn is one generation. In order:
Resolve events: Examples include elder deaths, animal migrations, feuds, or global cooling. If a trade ship arrives, an auction is held for its wares.
Assign hunters: Hunters are assigned to hunting grounds, resource gathering, colonizing the New World, raiding other tribes for wives or animals, or promotion to an elder.
Negotiate: Players can bribe others to peacefully withdraw hunters, including marrying them to their daughters. Players with a War Chief Elder can use hunters to attack others on the same card. The New World turns hostile if there are too many colonists.
Resolve hunting: Roll a die for each hunter and modify it for technologies and marriages. Success can result in gaining new hunters, resources, hand cards, wives, and/or technologies. Beware, as some animals can be confused by the prey-predator relationship and your hunters might not return. Some successes let your take cards from the central play area into your hand if within hand limit.
Maintain livestock: Pay to keep the animals you’ve already domesticated.
Take elder actions: Examples include invention, domestication, proselytization, and witch-burning. If you have no elders, you can convert to monotheism.
Depending on each player’s ending theistic worldview, he has a variable scoring based on successful hunts (polytheism) or resource gathering (monotheism).