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? What's in a game?
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. How's it play? Setup
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:
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.
Points are tallied, highest score wins. 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.
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