This is a straight-up economic game by Tom Lehmann, of Race for the Galaxy fame - you earn and spend increasing amounts of money, which lets you buy things, mostly in auctions, that make more money and/or score you points (and points win you the game). It traces its roots to Outpost - Tom wrote the Advanced rules (although these days, Scepter of Zavandor is very close descendant to the original). The theme overlaying these mechanics channel Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, particularly training and employing workers in jobs (and you can improve or get new jobs).

What's special about this iteration? It is very much the "distilled essence" of its predecessors - all sorts of details have been cut away and simplified. What you have is pure gaming goodness in 1.5 hours.
The downside? The game is fairly punishing - the details matter in the "every dollar counts" kind of way. That's not to say that you need everything to go your way to win the game - you'll often pay more than you want for the auctions, and win auctions you hadn't expected to.

So what is this game about? Players are rulers of a (very small) Phoenician-pre-city-state. Through cunning use of your economic might (auctions), you will develop your empire into the most glorious of the regional city-states (by achieving the highest VP score).

This review will focus on the gameplay itself - for a review of what comes in the box, see my previous review at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/2203411#2203411

Overview of the Game:
For all the talk about the difficulty in understanding the rules, the game itself is fairly simple.

Everyone starts with a basic set of technology tiles: a training ground with an untrained worker, and two jobs: hunting and farming. During the game, you have to train your workers by paying money (and yes, the black pawn symbol is for awesome trained people, unlike those uneducated white pawns). Once workers are trained, you can buy tools for them and employ them in the various jobs, which produce money every turn during the game as well as being worth points. Trained workers can use any tool, so if you buy them better tools, they can leave their current job and move up to the new one. They even leave their old tools behind so if you get more trained workers, they can pick up and use those tools. This part has a feel quite reminiscent of Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. The other part of your civilization is storage - you can only keep a limited number of coins (each worth 1) and cards (worth 4-6, mostly 5s) at the end of each round and after you generate money.

Each round, there are development cards to be auctioned. There's some randomness in the order of the developments appearing, but all cards in a particular set will appear before the next set. Each development card may generate money, score victory points or give some bonus. These include giving discount on specific future cards, upgrading an existing job to generate a bit more money, give out new jobs, workers or storage space. A minimum bid is also provided, so nothing is sold for too cheap (although you always gnash your teeth when someone gets their card at minimum price while you pay premiums).

At the start of the round, everyone gets their income, and has to throw away anything they can't store. There'll be development cards available for auction (number equal to the number of players). Starting with the Overlord (player with the current high score) and going clockwise, the current player may initiate auctions. Once they decide they're done starting auctions, they go on and upgrade their civilization (maybe using the new stuff they got). Once everyone gets a turn, you check to see if anyone's won (they highest VP score someone is past 32 VP), and then apply the storage one final time.

Mechanics:
Gameplay is pretty simple once you get going. Having to apply storage two times a turn feels inelegant, especially as it's mostly there to make coin storage a bit more useful. The turn order (clockwise from the Overlord) also seems a bit arbitrary - I'd think that starting the auctions in decreasing VP order would be more fair, although there's definitely no easy tie-break (if it were me, I'd use the disks to mark turn order and steal the mechanic from In the Year of the Dragon). Still, it is because how elegant the rest of the rules work that these bits stick out. It will definitely help to have someone knowledgeable guiding people through, especially for decoding the development cards - it's handy to just ask someone what a card does rather than looking them all up.

Now, I haven't played any of the predecessors (Outpost/Scepter of Zavandor), but I'll mention some simplifications that were nice to have. There is only one kind of card money, with low variance - previous games had more variance, and many different types of money. It's easy to figure out how much money you get on your turn - every 4 points of production gets you a card, and the remainder in coins. Plus (and perhaps most importantly), in auctions you get change in coins if you don't happen to spend an entire card (although there are limits at the end of turn). Permuting the card combinations to find the optimal bidding points in the other games sounds neat, but also very annoying.

Theme:
The theme is subtly effective in the way the mechanics play out - developments have game effects that make sense. First you build shipyards, the ships that come sailing in with money and points. A granary lets you store much more money. The effect is subtle, in that there are not really any rule-breaking effects on the cards - everything is straightforward.

However, some parts of the theme have decidedly rough edges. It feels like the theme was developed 75% of the way, and then...they just ran out of steam. For example, VP Purchase tile (?!) Well, yes, that tile lets you buy VPs, but these could have been themed as monuments, or statues, or works of art, or ... anything really. Another example of this is the technology upgrades - hunting becomes...improved hunting...and then...advanced hunting. Mining becomes improved mining, and then...you get the idea. Now, my knowledge of history is too weak to get appropriate names on these things, but you could get better progression by giving them better names (like Bronze to Iron to Steel, except I know nothing about the Phoenician developments of mining). At the same time, you could throw in a spot of art. The bar here is around the level of Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. And exactly what kind of money is used?

Gameplay:
All the bits look good on paper, but how does it come together? Amazingly well, I have to say. The auctions are intense - every dollar matters, especially in the beginning when you have so little. At the end, you might have more money, but so does everyone else. The number of cards in your hand and coins is open knowledge, so everyone knows roughly how much money others have, but in a game where you're trying to save every penny, do you bid a bit more, to guarantee that the other player can't outbid you (maybe he drew a 6) or take a chance and bid low to get it cheaper.

One thing that I keep noticing though is how valuable everything is. There are no false choices, in the sense that none of the choices are obvious bad plays. Every development card is useful, but if you spend all your money on developments, you waste the potential of your workers. And even if you've managed to train your workers and are now generating lots of money, it is useless unless you can store it or spend it. And once you've trained all your workers, you'll need to win development cards to get more...

The game does reward long-term planning, and thus familiarity with the game - saving money for future auctions is easier if you know the values of things which are coming up. Money is spent to make more money in this game, so mistakes early on can leave you poor in the midgame. However, all this means is that this is a heavyweight strategy game at heart - there's a bit of luck (order of the auctions, the money draws) but it's usually the most skillful player who prevails.

And the icing on the cake? This is a lightning-fast game - the 90 minute rating is fairly accurate, and can be substantially less with fewer than the full complement of players. 2 player online games positively fly by. The reason why? The two parts of the game - winning auctions for developments and upgrading your civilization - are pretty much separate. Once you're done bidding on auctions, you can optimise your civilization without interfering with the other players. And experience makes the math even faster.

Overall?
Phoenicia is a game of cutthroat auctions, that whirls by in an hour and a half. The theme has a light touch of the Civ-game feel - you have your developments, and you train workers in increasingly advanced jobs. You have lots of decisions, managing many interconnected resources - workers, production, storage, discounts, money, victory points - while competing for developments and turn order. The theme is a bit thin, and sometimes I wonder if things might have been a bit too stripped down, but these minor reservations do not detract much from a very excellent civ-auction game.