Your starting council members are randomized at the start of each new game. Keep restarting the game until you get an awesome council to start off with. There are special council members you can get with crazy stats.

Everything in the game is decided by random luck. Once you have the basics figured out you can progress easily by saving and reloading until you get a good result.

If GOG sold it for OS X, it'd be the Windows version run though emulation. The Mac OS version released in 1999 wouldn't run on any modern Macintosh without heavy prodding* (getting the Windows version to run would be a lot easier - just add Wine).

* Two reasons: Mac OS 8/9 - Classic support was never available on Intel. PowerPC - The Rosetta emulator was completely discontinued with OS X 10.7 Lion. A complete emulator would be required, running Mac OS 8 or 9.

I tried to play it in earnest several months ago. I studied the manual, played through the tutorial, but was still clueless about what to do each turn. Eventually I fiddled with my tribe's parameters and allocated mana points at random, but found no satisfaction in doing so since I had no idea what effect it would have on my people. Then other games came and I forgot about this one. I do plan to return to it one day.

The Let's Play helped me a lot figure out what I needed to do. it's an awesome game though. I hope you enjoy!

It's a difficult game to master. In fact i don't think you ever can truly master it, which is part of the point. As a 'simulation' of ancient tribes and what that 'might' be all about i think it gets pretty close to reality. This is speaking as someone that has always had a fascination with ancient history and it's peoples and as someone that has lived amongst some tribes in the south pacific.

I've played around 30 games of KoDP over the years and only twice been able to become King of Dragon Pass. But that is ok as ultimately this is not a game about that really. It is about the experience of each play through and getting you (a modern 21st century person) to step into the shoes of your ancestors and 'think' like them, share their kind of concerns (food, war, gods etc) and reconnect with the past we all come from.

This is not like 90% of all other games that are just simple 'kill everything to win' type games. KoDP is much more awesome, and much more difficult than that old trope.