Origins is the first of what will be five core games in the Chronicles Series by Dirk Knemeyer and Rob Daviau letting players build their own unique 4X civilizations that evolve from one game to the next. Daviau's Legacy mechanics will allow player experiences within each box game to evolve over a series of play sessions. Then, Knemeyer's Echo System will bridge the various games in the series, allowing the civilization that grew in a previous boxed game to continue into or otherwise influence a future historical epoch in subsequent releases.

Origins will include two different stages of Civilization and two complete games in one box. First, players will collaborate to form tribes in the early Stone Age. Each game session in this phase represents the origin story for one specific tribe that will seed the world of Chronicles. Players represent members in the tribe and must balance their own pursuit of power with helping to make the tribe stronger. As they accumulate influence relating to stability, growth, and understanding, they cooperate and use this influence to expand into new lands, respond to threats, seize opportunities, build infrastructure, or bolster the overall tribe's condition. Players will also pursue their own individual agendas competing to lead the tribe into the next era. Depending on their success, players will have different degrees of influence over the personality and assets that the tribe carries forward into history.

Once these tribes have been established, play progresses to the early Bronze Age as they convert into nascent city-states competing with one another in a largely undeveloped world. Each city-state will make choices about the composition of its population with various groups having different strengths and weaknesses that impact how they will perform in the success or failure of their city-state. Then, players will allocate their population to explore and expand, engage in trade, wage war, build infrastructure, or fuel their cultural identity and influence. At the end of the cycle not all of the tribes will have survived, but those that do will be immortalized and serve as the raw material from which the next stage in their world - the second and as-yet-unannounced Chronicles game - carries forward!