First Giants is a rethemed version of the 2015 game Elysium, which had a pretty good theme of its own but ultimately didn’t work because the game ended before you could get anything interesting going. (I reviewed it for Paste/AV Club.) This new game is a streamlined Elysium that focuses just on the set-collecting aspects, ditching the card-drafting mechanic of the original, so that the game is faster but a little more random.
In First Giants, you’re trying to collect sets of fossil cards in five colors, numbered 1 through 3, each of which has an immediate or an ongoing power on it. There are four ‘depots’ or dig sites from which you select cards, with two cards at each site; once you’ve gone to a particular dig site, you can’t go there again until you recall all of your markers (you have four, but can recall them at any time). When you take a card, you use its immediate power if it has one, then check the cards still in your active area to see if any of them have a power that applies to give you points, amber, or the ability to transfer a card.
When you recall your markers, you choose for each one whether to take one amber token or to pay the numerical value on a card to move it to your collections. Once it’s in a collection, its power goes away, but you don’t score any cards that aren’t in collections. You can create collections of 1-2-3 in any single color, or three cards of the same value in different colors. There are news tokens that you claim when you have the largest set of each type, and if you’re the first to get a set of three in any type, you get that bonus permanently, worth 3 or 5 points at game-end. (Board Game Arena’s implementation of the game has additional news tokens that give bonuses for transferring cards of specific colors all in the same turn, such as two oranges and a blue.)
The game ends once the last set bonus token is taken, which scales to the number of players, at which point you add up the points you earned during the game from card powers, the points from set tokens you obtained (2 points for 2 cards in a set, 3 if you got all 3), and points from your news tokens. This variable end condition means the game can drag on a bit if all players try to load up on points by not transferring cards to collections against the modest incentive to do so first for those news tokens.
Anyway, I never loved Elysium because it seemed like the game ended too quickly; you’d plan something, get it started, and then boom, the game was over. First Giants doesn’t have that problem at all; you can keep your cards active for long enough to get some benefit from them, and then shuffle them over to collections while replacing them with new cards that give you further benefits. It feels like you’ve always got something cooking. My issue with First Giants is that there’s nothing novel here: it is a workmanlike game, breaking no new ground, perfectly playable but not one I’m yearning to play again. I also still prefer the Elysium theme, as fossils/dinosaurs are kind of overdone. But I’m still going against the consensus here and saying First Giants is a slight improvement on the original, and definitely a more accessible game than Elysium is.