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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | JKLM Games | Phoenicia

Phoenicia

Price: £39.99

Board Game; 2-5 Players; Ages 12+ by JKLM Empires rise and fall. In the buffer areas and crossroads between civilizations, however, a clever ruler can sometimes adopt new ideas, establish trade, and found a city state -- such as the great Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon -- that will outlast many neighboring empires. Phoenicia about building an empire worthy of an entry into the annuals of time. you have to build up your economy and increase your population whilst holding all others at bay, you will be challenged your neighbouring countries to the next technology advancement which will help you to feed your population. ++++++++++++ Counter review ++++++++++++ 2-5 players, 60 minutes designed by Tom Lehmann reviewed by Stuart Dagger I can\'t remember whether it was Treebeard or Bernard Cribbins who first observed that you never get nowhere if you\'re too hasty, but it\'s certainly the case that a not uncommon criticism of games is that they could have been so much better had the designer taken more time over the development and not been in such a hurry to publish. It\'s not a charge that could be made against this one, which has a rulebook carrying the message ``Tom Lehmann ©1998-2007\'\'. The story goes back to the early 1990s and an American company that produced games under the twin logos of TimJim and Prism. I was never privy to the inside story of how the company came together, but there were two designers, James Hlavaty and Tom Lehmann, and my guess was that each had his own mini-company which was part of the whole. One of their earliest games was a Hlavaty design called Outpost. Published in 1991 this was described as a ``game of economic conflict in the 22nd century\'\'. Players were commanders of some deep space colony and were charged with the task of building up an economy. Resources and technologies were imported from Earth and bid for by the players. These were then used to build multi-layer economic engines. It was a long and fairly complicated game, but we were tougher in those days and enough people liked the multiple strategic routes the game offered for it to acquire a cult following. In 2004 Outpost\'s mechanisms (properly credited) were used by Jens Drögemuller to create Das Zepter von Zavandor, a game which replaced the science fiction with fantasy and halved the playing time. What we have in Phoenicia is another attempt at a simpler and shorter Outpost-style game, this time by the other half of the TimJim/Prism duo. It is less indebted than was Drögemuller\'s game to the original for its mechanisms, but the general idea is the same: players have to build an economic model; they have a variety of routes they can follow; and they acquire what they need by bidding against other players for limited resources and technologies. The setting this time is the Eastern Mediterranean of 3000 years ago. Each player begins with a set of four ``mini-boards\'\' representing the economic areas of farming, hunting, storage and workers. This is a pre-money economy and so the storage area is where you keep the goods that are your wealth. In game terms this placing of the game in the time before coinage is important, because limited storage space puts a cap on the amount of wealth you can carry over from one turn to another and that limits your ability to ``save up\'\'. There is a ``granary\'\' development that you can try to acquire later and this will increase your storage capacity, but at the start you are constrained to two production cards and three production discs. This is where the game cheats a little for a pre-money game, as there is an exchange rate of 4 discs to the card. The cards themselves come from a face-down deck and are worth between 4 and 6 discs each - a piece of variability that keeps your precise wealth concealed from your rivals. The worker board is the so-called ``training ground\'\' and is where you keep your unassigned work force. It has two sections - untrained and trained. You have to pay to train your workers and then pay again to assign them to a particular area such as hunting or farming. This second payment, which represents the purchase of the tools they will need, varies with the area. Buying a bow and arrow costs less than buying a set of farm tools. A distinctive feature of the game is that, apart from your initial allocation of three (one hunter, one farmer and one spare), workers can only be got by buying certain development cards. This puts them in short supply. In a game such as Outpost, where you are attempting to create a colony quickly on some distant planet, this makes sense, but in a game set on Earth a situation where it is easier to generate wealth than people seems curious. I can only presume that the ancient Phoenicians were putting something in the water. No matter, it\'s a feature and it helps make the play interesting. Hunting and farming are sources of both income and victory points. Each worker you deploy in these areas brings in income each round and VP when first placed. Farming pays better than hunting, but, as already noted, equiping a farmer with the tools of his trade is more expensive than doing the same for a hunter. At the start of each round there will be a number of development cards on display. They are acquired by auction, subject to a minimum bid that is specified for each card. You don\'t have to buy one, and indeed there will be times when it is better to either save your money or spend it on something else such as deploying new workers. Any cards left unbought at the end of the round stay in place to form part of the offer for the next round. The cards come in four levels and the deck is seeded to ensure that they come out in a sensible order. Each card represents some sort of economic advance: a new area such as mining or clothmaking in which to place your workers; a skill advance that gives you better returns from an existing area; improved storage facilities; more workers. Almost all the cards give you victory points and some, such as ships and glassmaking give your income a boost without the need to assign workers to them. A number also give discounts against other cards, thereby benefitting those who are buying to a plan rather than playing the magpie. The rest of the round is concerned with training, employing or shifting workers and dealing with various bits of minor bookkeeping. The victory target is a pre-set number of victory points and the game finishes at the end of the round in which someone reaches this. One of the criticisms levelled against Outpost is that it suffers from the ``runaway leader\'\' problem, and it can be quite difficult for economic games to avoid this, since it is a basic law of economics that it is much easier for the rich to make large amounts of money than it is for the poor. In games the problem tends to be particularly acute when items are bought by auction, as they are here. If you have more money in your hand than your rivals, you can outbid them whenever an item that is central to your plan becomes available, and this can turn into a game-long advantage for the player who gets off to a good start. To get round this a game needs some sort of artificial wrinkle, and an attempt has been made here to provide one by forcing the leader to go first each round and having a rule to the effect that you can\'t participate in auctions once your turn in a round is over. This makes it easier for those lagging behind to ``bid up\'\' the price of an item wanted by the leader, while making it harder for them to retaliate. It helps, but I\'m not convinced it solves the problem completely, and the last couple of rounds can still be something of a formality as you all go through the motions waiting for the player who is obviously going to win to cross the line. However, this section of the game doesn\'t last too long and you shouldn\'t let the minor quibble put you off trying what is an interesting game. I\'m not sure that it is one with staying power, since an inevitable result of squeezing a development game into a 60 minute time-frame is that the number of strategic routes to be explored has been cut to a minimum, but I think you\'ll get enough enjoyment out of it for it to be worth buying. The production is not quite up to the standard of On The Underground - JKLM\'s previous release - with my main complaint being that removing the mini-boards from their surrounds required a deal of careful work with a Stanley knife. This was one reminder of the old days of Avalon Hill that I could have done without. But once the job is done, the components are decent enough. I do, though, have a grumble about the size of the box: it could have been half the depth and still fitted everything in. I appreciate that many publishers list ``enclosing empty space with cardboard\'\' in the hobbies section of their entries in Who\'s Who, and Phoenicia is far from being the worst example I\'ve come across, but JKLM have always been guilt free in this regard in the past and so it is a shame to see them going astray now. Compare this box with the On the Underground one and you\'ll see what I\'m on about. Don\'t these people realise that we all have a limited amount of shelf space?

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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | JKLM Games | Phoenicia

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