Phoenicia is a build-your-economy game based on Outpost, an older game still appreciated by a lot of people. According to the elder scrolls of gaming knowledge Tom Lehmann, Phoenicia's designer, started with Outpost and tried to remove everything that wasn't fundamental to the game.

I've never played Outpost or Zepter von Zavandor, which is also based on the old classic, so I can't say if he was successful or not. What I can say is that Phoenicia is really a bare bones design, where everything was streamlined and all the fat removed. As a result, resources are very, very tight and all the decisions really matter. It's a really concentrated design that provides a very good punch in an hour or less.

I'm not going to go into too many details about the rules, because I think that's the job of the rulebook.

Simply put, this is an auction game. Players start with some basic knowledge (farming, hunting, storage and worker training) represented by big cardboard tiles and some workers, represented by the dreaded white plastic pawns. Two of these workers are already trained and working at the start of the game (one's hunting and the other is farming) and provide an initial production and some points.

Players also start with some production cards (equivalent to money) which they'll use to buy technologies in an auction. These technologies (things like glassmaking, granaries, shipyards, etc) bring several kinds of benefits: some unlock more productive activities like mining or clothmaking or upgrade existing activities to their improved or advanced equivalents, while others just increase production and/or points. There are also technologies that provide more workers and expanded storage. Players cannot buy workers directly and as a result the little buggers will be a very scarce resource. You'll spend a lot of time wishing for more ugly white plastic pawns!

A player's turn is a simple cycle: starting with the overlord, a player can put one or more cards for auction, if there are any available and the player has money for the initial bid (each card has a minimum value). Then he can train workers and assign them to activities, paying the associated cost. After the player has completed his turn he's not allowed to enter further auctions during the round and play proceeds to the player on the left.

After all players have completed their turns, there's a common bookkeeping fase. Players get cards according to their current production and storage limits are enforced. If someone has more cards in his hand or coins in his treasury than storage allows, he's forced to discard. Replacement technologies for those auctioned are drawn and a new turn begins. The new overlord is the player in the lead

I have to say that I like this one a lot! The rules are very simple (although a little bit difficult to read), but the game presents a very high density of very tough decisions, turn after turn. As said before resources are very tight and every cent counts. Overbidding can ruin a player's chances of winning and sometimes it's just better to save money instead of buying something. I really like that there are several dimensions to the game's economy so players are forced to balance things out. For instance, if you forget to upgrade your storage, you'll be forced to discard most of your production and all your expensive workers and production technologies will be useless.

It reminds me of Goa, another well regarded "build your economy" game, where the same kind of balance is needed for ships and spices. In fact I think there are several other similarities to Goa: in both games you must buy stuff that improves your efficiency and then put that stuff to good use. However I think Phoenicia is more unforgiving. If you fail to buy a certain tile in Goa there's always an almost as good alternative, so the player isn't really hurt most of the time. Goa is all about having a plan A and a lot of plan Bs that are used everytime plan A fails. In Phoenicia, on the other hand, fail to buy a crucial tech and you can suffer a world of pain, as you see all your activities rotting without workers to man them or part of your precious production wasted because you don't have enough storage! This is actually a good thing, in my opinion, because it encourages players to pay close attention to each other's games and use aggressive auctioning as a weapon. As a result, there are some really tense auctions during the game!

The downside of all this is that Phoenicia can be an awful game for newbies to play. Players need to know the cards and the whole flow of the game to have a chance to do well and a newbie will always be crushed by the experienced player. This isn't a problem if players were aware of this from the start but otherwise can be a little frustrating. I have the feeling that this has something to do with some of the "runaway leader" threads posted in these forums.

To sum it up, I think this is a very good game. It packs a lot of interesting decisions and tense auctions in less than one hour. Components could be better but are perfectly acceptable and the rules are poorly written but not nearly as bad as I feared based on what I'd read here. I give it a solid 8, but it can go up with further plays!