The game itself comes with several quality components. First, there is a board, divided up into fifteen provinces, plus a price aid, temple area, and outside scoring track.
There’s a good bit of bits, including score markers, auction markers, ownership tokens, building stones, pyramids, double pyramids, and farmers. There are also upright pieces for the Pharaoh and the Temple.
And finally, there are cards. Cards come in three simple flavors:
* Province - There is one Province card for each of the fifteen provinces
* Money - There is a normal bank amount of money, in various denominations. Each player also gets one Steal card for Temple offerings, which he keeps with his money.
* Power - These are special cards that can be cashed in for powers or points at various parts of the game. Every player specifically begins with one Power card, the Master Builder. Alternately, you can also trade them in for 1 gold each when you’re purchasing things and offering at the Temple, which quite possibly devalues the Power card, but sometimes you just need 1 more gold…
It is important to note that the backs of all of the Money and Power cards look the same. This will be important for the blind bidding that goes on during the Temple offering.
The game is made up of 6 turns, 3 turns in the Old Kingdom and 3 turns in the new Kingdom. There are scoring phases after turns 3 and 6, so you only have three turns to pull off what you need to each time.
Each turn is made up of 5 phases.
1. Draw Province cards equal to the number of players playing, and lay them down on the appropriate space on the board.
2. Auction off the provinces. In turn order (which will always begin with whoever holds the Pharaoh token), players place their auction marker on any numbered space on the Province card they want. They can go onto a card which someone else has already bid on, but they obviously will have to go higher. This will get pricey, due to the triangular numbers (see below). After everyone has placed, anyone who has been outbid must, in turn order, move their tokens to a different card.
Immediately, we can see many clever elements of this. Often, you are forced to consider making your first bid on your second favorite province drawn, just in case you get outbid (or if you plan to be out bid), so you can move to your preferred province. Also of note is the very nature of this auction allows at least one person to always get a province for free. There is a 0 bidding space on every card, and whoever takes the last card will have no reason to bid anything for it.
The provinces all have different characteristics. Many have space for farmers to be built. Some have automatic income, though some only get automatic income when the Nile is low (see below). Many also come with one-time rewards whenever you win them; these could be free building stones, Power cards, or gold. Also, all provinces have a number of Power cards listed on them; this notes the limits of how many Power cards you can buy in the next phase.
3. Buy stuff, in turn order. You can buy farmers, building stones, or Power cards (the number of Power cards being limited by the specific provinces you own). The gimmick here is the same as at with the Province cards: triangular numbers.
A Brief Lesson
Triangular numbers are numbers which are the sum of n consecutive whole numbers. What this means is that we add together a bunch of numbers that go in a row.
0 = 0
0 + 1 = 1
0 + 1 + 2 = 3
0 + 1 + 2 + 3 = 6
0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10
0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15
etc.
In game terms, this means that things get more and more expensive very quickly. The bids on provinces rise quickly, and the price of farmers, building stones, and Power cards goes up very quickly.
When you buy any of these three things, you consult the price chart on the board, which is just triangular numbers. So, if I buy 3 farmers, 4 building stones, and 2 Power cards, I’ll be paying 19 gold (6 + 10 + 3). This is the meat of the game right here, figuring out how to optimize your spending choices.
Power cards go to your hand, farmers to any open farmer spaces you have in any of your provinces, and building stones to anywhere you want. If you ever get three building stones in the same location, it turns in a pyramid, and it is these things which will score you points.
4. Everyone makes a secret offering to the temple, revealed simultaneously. You can put up gold and Power cards (which count at 1 gold each) or you can steal by playing you -3 gold card. The offerings are added up, subtracting where people stole. You then move the Temple token to the appropriate space on the four Temple levels, which symbolizes how pleased your god Amun-Re is pleased with the offering, and how generous he’ll be with the Nile this year.
If you stole, you actually get 3 gold from the bank, otherwise you’ll get favors (which translate into a free farmer, Power card, or building stone each). Also, whoever put the most into the offering becomes the new Pharaoh and takes the Pharaoh token.
5. Everyone harvests for income. As noted earlier, some provinces give you automatic income. Others give income at low Temple level (symbolizing the camel trade the Egyptians would be forced into in times of drought).
Primarily, you’ll get money from farmers. Each farmer gives you 1 gold per Temple level. This means if you have a lot of farmers, you’ll want to make a larger offering so that you get a bigger payoff during harvest. Other people will probably see this, and might under-offer or steal, expecting you to pick up the slack.
Repeat these five phases every round. At the end of the third round, there is a scoring phase, where you get points based off of number of pyramids, sets of pyramids, most pyramids, number of temples in your provinces (which score according to Temple level), and whatever Power cards you can play for bonus points.
Here’s the very clever bit. After this first scoring phase, you remove all farmers and ownership tokens from the board, but leave all of the pyramids and building stones. Shuffle the province cards up again. Then you play the next three rounds. All of the sudden, the value of different provinces changes significantly. Something which you only gave an average value might already have two or three pyramids on it already. Something which was a great deal before might not have any pyramids. The sudden change of values in the New Kingdom adds a huge replay value to the game, as you’ll rarely find two sessions being the same.
You play through the next three rounds, score the game again, and you’re done. I’ve rarely seen a game which was anything but close, and often we can look at the end of the game and see where any number of minor mistakes could have been fixed. There is a bit of a learning curve to Amun-Re, but it’s largely from learning all of the phases, icons, and Power cards, and not from picking up on strategy.
All in all, Amun-Re is one of my favorite games, and ideal for anyone who wants a “light brain-burner.” This is no T&E, but it has complexity and depth that one might equate with, say, Puerto Rico. I dig it.
(Much thanks to ddkk, Whimsikill, Von Cougar, matthew.marquand, tdelme, ethim, and Slugger for uploading the images.)
Last edited on 2008-01-31 09:59:00 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Thu Jan 31, 2008 3:56 pm
