Akropolis - First Play!

4th October 2022

Tuesday is here again and it means more gaming fun with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking.

You can't really go wrong when you set your game in ancient Greece! Is that the case here in this drafting, tile laying and city building game?

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What's in a game?

• Tiles: Akropolis uses unusual hex based tiles and comes with 2 types.
  Starter Tiles: There are 4 of these quite strange looking tiles which have a central hex that has 3 more hexes attached to half it's edges (For a total of 4 hex spaces.). Each starter has a 'housing blue plaza' on the central hex while the others are 'quarry' spaces. More on these below.

Start tile.

• Tiles: The vast majority of the game's tiles are these 3 hex space tiles which feature a mixture of the game's 5 different types of district, 5 different types plaza and quarries in various combinations.

Tiles.

• ​​Stones: Little grey cubes are used to represent stone which is in essence a currency for acquiring tiles.
• First player token: A chunky circular token.

The tiles that come with Akropolis are possibly the thickest I've ever seen, they are incredibly chunky and solid feeling - fantastic!
The little cubes are wooden I think.
I don't usually bother mentioning the packaging for games, but the game box comes with inserts already fitted and filled with all the pre-punched tiles. This is excellent packaging.

The game uses bird's-eye illustrations of different types of buildings or neighbourhoods crossed with splashes of colours to represent the different districts. The same is true of the plazas.
Thus the 5 districts are differentiated by both colour and illustration. There 5 types of plaza each which correspond to a different district, they're also differentiated by the associated colour and have a small illustration similar to their associated district. Finally; quarries are grey.
The artwork is fairly subdued but the colour makes it pop. It's perfectly adequate but I wouldn't call it great.

The game's iconography is straightforward to learn and intuitive to understand. The districts and their respective plazas are easily associated.

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How's it play?
​Setup

• Tiles: First sort the tiles to use as per the player count, then shuffle them into 11 face-down stacks of equal size.
  The size of each stack will be equal to the player count +1.
  There will be a number of tiles left over equal to the player count +2, these will form the starting 'Construction Site'.
  Construction site: When creating the construction site, those remaining tiles should be placed in a line. However, determine which end of the line is the 'start' before flipping the tiles face-up.
• Players: Give each a starting tile.
• First player: Determine the starting player and give them the first player token, this will set the turn order round-to round, with the starting player going first and the player on their left going next and so on.
  Stones: The starting player should take 1 stone from the supply, whoever goes next should take 2 stones and so on.

On to play
In Akropolis, players will be building their own city by drafting tiles from the construction site and adding them to the existing tiles in their personal area. Each type of district scores points differently and additional points can potentially be scored by building upwards!
Akropolis uses a standard turn order with the active player taking their action before play moves on to the player on their left.
During a turn, the following actions will occur:

• Take tile: The active player must take a tile from the construction site.
  Cost: The first tile at the start of the construction site is always free, however, each tile further down the line will cost an additional stone to acquire. In other words, if a player wants the 3rd tile down the line it will cost 2 stone. This means tiles later in the line will get cheaper over turns and eventually maybe even free.
  All stone paid is returned to the supply.
• Add tile to city: The active player must add the tile they just acquired to their city. There are 2 ways this can be done.
  • Expand: A player may expand their city outwards, this is done by placing at least one side of the tile against at least one side of a existing tile.
  • Upwards: A tile may also be placed on top of existing tiles. Before explaining the rules for building upwards, it's worth explaining why it can be a good to do so. Basically; districts which are correctly positioned in a city have a base Victory Point (VP.) value of 1. A district on the 2nd layer of a city has a base value of 2 VPs, on the 3rd layer base value is 3 VPs and so on.
    When build upwards, there are some requirements though.
    Across multiple tiles: When building upwards, tile cannot be placed directly on another single other tile, i.e., a tile must cross between at least 2 tiles when covering them.
    No overhang: When placing a tile on top of other tiles, there can be no overhangs.
    Covered spaces: Any districts or plazas covered by a tile will no longer contribute towards scoring at the game end.
    Quarries: However, each quarry space covered over, will earn the active player a stone and in fact, this is the only way to acquire additional stones.
• End of turn: Once the active player has had their turn, play progresses to the player on their left.
• End of round: A round ends when only 1 tile remains in the construction site.
  You will notice that since the number of tiles at the start of a round are equal to player count +2, it means the first player gets to take 2 tiles in the same round! (A 3-player game will start each round with 5 tiles and ends when 4 are taken, so the starting player is also the finishing player!) This is 'as designed'. Since the starting player player changes every round, over the course of a game, players will all have equal turns
  When the end of a round is reached, the following 2 actions occur.
  Construction site: The single remaining tile becomes now becomes the first tile in the line and new tiles from a face-down stack are added to the construction site and then flipped face-up.
  New starting player: The first player token is passed to the player on the left who will start the subsequent.

Endgame
Play continues until only 1 tile remains in the construction site and no stacks remain to refill it. The game immediately ends the final tile is not played (I've seen this happen!) and goes to scoring.

Scoring needs to be explained in a little detail.
The 5 types of district each score differently (As explained below). Thus, each type will generate it's own base score. Each hex that scores for it's district will score 1VP per hex per level. For the purpose of scoring, tile height does not affect adjacency. This means a house space will still be adjacent to another house space even if they're on different levels.
Finally, covered hexes score no points.

Once the base score for each district has been established, that score is multiplied by the number of stars on plazas (Not plazas themselves.) of the matching type the player has.
E.g., a player who has base barrack score of 5 and 4 stars on their barrack plaza spaces will score (5x4) 20 VPs.
Height makes no difference to plaza scoring multipliers: House plaza spaces always have 1 star (And thus a x1 multiplier.), barrack, market and temple plazas always have 2 stars (x2), while garden plaza spaces always have 3 stars (x3).
As with districts, covered plazas do not contribute towards multipliers.

There are actually 6 ways to score VPs.

• Barracks (Red.): Barrack spaces score it they are on the edge of the city, that is, at least 1 side of a barrack hex has nothing adjacent to it.
• Gardens (Green.): No matter where a garden space is situated, it always scores.
• Houses (Blue.): Only a player's single largest contiguous group of blue spaces is scored.
• Markets (Yellow.): A market space scores if it is not adjacent to any other market spaces.
• Temples (Purple.): A market spaces must be fully surrounded by any other spaces (Including other temple spaces.) in order to score.
• Stones: Finally, any unspent stones are worth 1VP each.

All base scores are multiplied by plaza multipliers and then totalled.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Drafting and tile placement mechanics, differing scoring based on relative positioning, even building upwards: These are game elements we've seen elsewhere lots of times but in Akropolis, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The game manages to wrap all of this into a elegant easy to learn, quick to play package that provides some thoughtful and meaningful decisions to make.

Just like city-planning, it pays to think ahead in Akropolis. Players want temples surrounded but they won't want to that with barracks and so on. Because the different scoring criteria pull against each other, players will need to think about where to place districts both immediately and in later turns in the most optimal manner. Maximising scoring while minimising conflict with other districts.
In practice, most players will generally end up trying to concentrate on 2 or 3 of the types of district, it's hard to score well in all 5.
All of this is of course contextual, depending on what appears where in the construction site. Players may find themselves competing for a particular type of district or if they're lucky, picking a district type being ignored by other players.
There's a bit of higher level play going on here that involves watching what other players are concentrating on and either denying it to them or ignoring it to optimise scoring with a different district.

It's also worth noting that districts are asymmetrical. While the garden district has flexible placement rules and and has a higher scoring multiplier, garden districts and garden plazas are both less common meaning competition between players for them can be fiercer.

Being able to build upwards adds an extra wrinkle into the mix because it can provide greater scoring but can also provide a headache. Sometimes players will need to cover a point-scoring district to get more points from a different district.
This bring me to quarries, they're initially mostly useless and can get in the way until covered but managing to put 3 together in a 'triangle' means covering them with a tile will earn 3 stones, very useful.
If players aren't careful, they can quickly run out of stones and only being able to take the free first tile during a turn can be painful experience when something so much better is further down the line.
Putting together blocks of quarries not only creates a place to build upwards but also earns stones when doing so.

All in all, I think that Akropolis is a very good, fun game, it's perhaps a little too long and involved for a filler and short for a whole gaming session, however, when players know what they're doing, it's entirely possibly to play a couple of games in a hour and why wouldn't you?
Akropolis immediately became a firm favourite of mine and is liked by pretty much everyone I play it with.
If tile-laying games appeal to you, this is definitely worth a try.