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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Phalanx Games | Anasazi

Anasazi

Price: £16.99

This item usually ships in 2 to 3 days.

RRP - £18.99

Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 10+ by Phalanx Games The Anasazi tribes lived in the middle west of America and built their settlements mainly in the caves of canyons. Strangely, and as yet unexplained, all the settlements were abandoned in the 13th century. It took a very long time until the cities and their treasures were discovered, as they were hidden in canyon walls and difficult to reach. The players take part in different expeditions and try to discover the treasures of the different Anasazi tribes. +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine Review +++++++++++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 30 minutes designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede reviewed by Ben Baldanza When you create something like Carcassonne, how do you ever live up to that? Klaus-Jürgen Wrede has created Venedig, Mesopotamia, Krone & Schwert, but nothing has come close to the elegance and simplicity of Carcassonne. Anasazi is his latest output, and again fails to capture the charm of his juggernaut though the weight of the games is somewhat similar. Themed in the US Southwest, the ``board\'\' is made up of irregularly-shaped Mesa tiles placed in two circles around a larger Mesa tile. The table space between the tiles is ``in play\'\' and represents the valleys between the mesas, and this creates one of the first odd things about the game: the distance between the mesas is critical yet very random, since players walk through the region using ``expedition markers\'\' of a fixed size. Some of the Mesa tiles have spaces for towers and these are randomly placed on these tiles at the beginning, hiding one of the four colors they represent. Treasure cubes in these same four colors are scattered about on the tiles in designated places as well, and through the game players try to collect the most valuable set of treasures. In the valleys between the Mesa tiles (your game table, that is), players can place campsites. These essentially are nodes that help you work your way among the mesas. During a turn, a player either places one of these campsites or guides an expedition. Guiding an expedition means taking an expedition marker to start or continue an expedition. This aspect of the game is like Wildlife Adventure (or Expedition) in that each expedition must be continued from its end. Guiding an expedition to a space with a treasure lets you take that treasure, and guiding it to a space with a tower requires you to take the tower. Expeditions are started from one of six base camp sites located just outside the field of mesas, and only one expedition can be started from each. When placing, a new expedition marker must fully cover the explorer that marks the active end of the previously-placed marker, and a player is allowed to cover only their own campsites. This is why positioning of the campsites is important, as they help to ensure more efficient movement. The towers determine the ultimate value of the four treasure types. There are five towers in each of the four colors, and as the towers are drawn they are placed onto a scoring tile to mark how many of that color tower still remain among the mesas. The game ends when four towers of any one color are drawn, and the value of each of the treasures is then determined as the number of towers not drawn for each color. Since the tower color is randomized and the tower colors are not revealed until taken, this appears to create a very random scoring algorithm. Yet Wrede has created two ways to help counteract this, by creating ways for a single player to examine towers in advance. Each player can look at any one tower every time they place a campsite. Also, the first time any expedition reaches a mesa with a tower, the player who guided the expedition there can look at a tower on that mesa. This helps to form a strategy of what color to collect once you get a sense of which colors are likely to score more. Adding to this, each player secretly is dealt a card showing one color for which they will score double. In practice, manipulating the treasure score by only taking the color towers that optimize your treasure stack is impossible. Instead, the game feels quite random in play and the table best not get knocked into or the relationship among the mesas and the placed expedition markers will be ruined. Placing the expedition markers reminds one of Dragon Delta, but in that game the bridges were all of different lengths and that added more strategy to their placement. In Anasazi, each marker is the same length and it is not allowed to ``test\'\' to see where a marker will reach before placing it. In most cases the campsites will be placed only when you need to guide an expedition into a certain area or to stop someone from doing just that. Taking a full turn just to see the tower color may make sense only very late in the game, and with six expeditions going on the scoring at the end is very difficult to control. It also takes a surprising amount of space, making it hard to play on smaller tables. The overall result is an odd game that seems like it should be better than it is.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Phalanx Games | Anasazi

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