Round 1: 4000BC - 2360BC
A day's journey from the oasis where we rested brought our tribe to a plain at the edge of a forest. We could see the sacred mountain from there. It was here that Huitzilopochtli gave us the sign. An eagle circled above the plain where we stood and let out three piercing shrieks. The elders met and decided that the land would yield us much if we settled here. So we did:
And it reveals gold to the NE. It's not in our BFC, but I'm happy enough having one so near to us. Our second city should probably grab that gold so that we could work it asap for a great early game research boost.
We worked the oasis and began researching Polytheism as our first tech:
Yes, we are giving early religion a shot, comrades. I followed the general advice of going for Hinduism instead of Buddhism (since Polytheism is more useful in the long run). There seems to be an agreement here that we would miss either religion by 1 turn if AIs with Mysticism decide to research them first, but, hey, it's not going to be fun if we only play safe, right? If we get it, the early culture and happiness bonus would be nice, and it would guarantee us a holy city that we control early enough to be useful.
Our first build was a warrior, since we would need troops for garrison duty soon enough. And we will probably need to build another one later to protect our settler.
As our initial scout made a circuit to reveal the immediate surroundings of our capital, it popped two huts. The first gave us 54 gold. The second gave us another scout:
Great! Now we probably had all the scouts we need without having to build any. There's another hut to the south (the number of huts around our capital is remarkable for this level), which we popped for a map. Ah, well. We can't be
that lucky.
Tenochtitlan grew to size 2 and we worked a high food tile to continue growing quickly:
The earlier we can work more tiles, the better it is, IMO. It would give us more flexibility.
And, a few turns later....
So our gamble paid off

The world will tremble before the might of the Hindu faith!
Next, we researched Agriculture so that we could farm that corn when our first worker (which we started on after the warrior) is built. The first warrior went off to help explore. One of our scouts had been eaten by lions
Agriculture was followed by Animal Husbandry, since we have pigs in our BFC. Hopefully it would reveal horses nearby as well.
Our capital soon grew to size 3. It's at the happiness limit now without a garrison, so we had to build a garrison warrior before the city hit size 4:
By this point I was beginning to fear we had an isolated start. No neighbour had popped up and we seemed to be bordered by sea at least on three sides. Our scouts had all been eaten by animals and our first warrior is left exploring alone. He just popped a hut for experience further to the SE when he met our first neighbour:
Phew! At least we weren't alone.
France was actually quite close to us, but water bodies make their part of the continent less accessible.
Anyway, Animal Husbandry was soon discovered, and look where we found horses:
So far so good. Switched our next research to the Wheel so that we could hook the horses up asap. Barb archers were beginning to appear. And, as you can see, our worker had farmed the corn. This made growth quicker and resulted in a perfect timing:
After the warrior, we started on a settler. Time to get a second city up.
And we met another neigbour:
Yikes, we have Creative neighbours! This is going to be annoying.
I stopped playing after our settler is built. We need to decide on where to place our second city. I have made a dotmap of possible sites:
Blue A would grab both the gold and the stone (as well as incense for later) and get fresh water bonus from the river. However, there would be significant overlap with the capital and both cities might have to share the pigs, especially if we want the second city to work the gold. Red A wouldn't grab the stone, but it would grab corn so that the second city would have a high food tile on its own. And we wouldn't need to build a plantation to hook up the incense later on if we settle here. The brown '?' is a possible coastal site to grab stone (and another corn) if we choose Red A.
Site B is a good spot to settle a city. It's on the coast and grabs horses, another gold and another happiness resource (whales). I'm thinking of settling our third city there. Or should the second city go there?
Here's a map of the lower explored part of the continent:
French lands are situated in thick jungle (good opportunity to attack with Jaguars?). We haven't actually found the location of the Romans, having only met their scout.
The other question is should we try to build the Oracle to grab CoL? To do that, we could research Priesthood after BW (we're in the middle of researching Mining to get to BW) and Writing while we build and chop for the wonder. But would it be too late?