After a bit of a break, we played another game of Mare Nostrum last night. Present were:

John (Egypt)
Phil (Carthage)
Jeanette (Rome)
Terry (Greece)
Ben (Babylon)

Phil and Terry were new to the game.

Although there were only five players we still used the expansion board, and played to 5 honders, with the pyramids costing 13. This game confirmed the sense in this and I would not play to four honders again.

I had never played with Egypt before, and in our previous games, Egypt had never been in the game, being crushed early by Carthage, so I was not hopeful. However, after a standard round one, where Carthage traded three and everyone built caravans and markets on the obvious places, I had enough tax for a honder on turn two, and I chose Helen Of Troy, which more-or-less made me protected from attack, at least for a while.

However, Egypt’s expansion options are pretty limited, although the papyrus is always good for trading.

It was a tense couple of rounds when Carthage decided to trade eight on round three and five on round four. I was very concerned about someone building the pyramids, until we realised that there was no pottery or gems being produced yet.

Part of the reason for the big trades was that people were concerned about me getting enough tax to build the pyramids, which with Hermes (produce an additional three of one type of resource) was quite possible. My problem was that with Carthage trading a lot I could not hold my taxes for producing honders, let alone the pyramids!

Meanwhile the other countries were doing the same as me: expanding and building honders – Jeanette and Ben each built honders on rounds three and four, so the rest of us started excluding them from the trading until there was poor cards (for them) remaining.

Jeanette (Rome) partly solved that problem for herself by buying the Temple Of Artemis, which produces one resource of any kind. Ben (Babylon) bought the Lighthouse, which allows you to build influence anywhere, so he put one on the pottery area. It also put Jeanette and Ben on four honders each.

I grabbed Hermes again, and on round six I built another honder (my third) – Antigone, which lets me not participate in the trading phase. This meant that I could produce eight tax (four cites with temples), plus two carried over from the previous turn, plus one from Cleopatra’s ability plus three from Hermes, making 14 for the pyramids which was immune to how many Carthage nominated to trade! What I did not figure on was Greece using Baal to destroy one of my cities, leaving me with only 12 taxes and agonisingly one short of winning.

Carthage traded five, so Greece, Carthage and Egypt simply traded amongst ourselves, to keep Rome and Babylon from getting enough for their final honders. I had to put out some tax, and near the end of the trade Jeanette suddenly realised that Greece (Terry) was grabbing all of the tax offered, and with his big tax production he may have 13 – and so he did. Terry sneakily crept up on us and won the game! By then he was Political Leader as well, so the fact that Ben could build his fifth honder meant Ben came second and not equal first.


Thoughts

The feature of the game was that there was only one very minor battle the whole time. This was partly because I had Helen Of Troy, which made Egypt (usually an easy target) much tougher, but the main reason for the lack of battles was that there were so many cards traded that we did not need to battle to secure resources for honders.

In retrospect, I think that whoever plays Carthage should know what they are doing, more than the other nations, although its been only after this game that I had realised this. Director Of Commerce is a very powerful role so in the future I think we will make sure that an experienced player has Carthage. This is, of course, no criticism of Phil in this game.

Even without this, the game progressed along a similar path to the others – the resource production is such that someone will build their fifth honder within 7-8 rounds, which makes it a very quick game without much time for building armies and battling. This leaves me curious as to how battling comes about in other games, since it seems like turtling is clearly the best way to go for all players.