As usual, it seems like the introduction of a new Knizia game is being greeted with some mixed feelings. How many auction games can he sell us? Can it really be somthing new? Hasn't he done it all yet?

Personally, I was impressed with Knizia's newest release, Amun-Re. This criticism Knizia sometimes gets for endlessly re-using similar mechanisms may not be entirely unfair in his small-box stuff (to which I am generally lukewarm), but in his larger games, appearances can be decieving. True, you wouldn't mistake this for a game from any other designer - Amun-Re is an auction game, sort of, with a variety of contradictory ways to score points, but it is very different from his previous games in a variety of ways.

The general idea is that you want to build pyramids. There are really two auctions involved: first the auctioning of building sites, each of which comes with a different set of "infrastructure": mainly farmland (for installing farmers which will generate income) and trade routes (which provide a more-or-less fixed income). The auction mechanism is interestingly unusual, but boils down mainly to the fact that you have increase your bids geometrically to outbid previous players, and you have to bid carefully because if you are overbid, you can't immediately come back and bid on the same property again.

Players then purchase not only building blocks which they can turn into pyramids (whose only function is to earn VPs), but also farmers (to generate money later) and power cards (which provide various special actions, including granting VPs if your building sites are arrayed in various specific permutations a la Princes of Florence prestige cards).

Once this is done, there is another "harvest" auction (this one a standard "in the fist" with a minor tweak) in which a few more blocks, cards, and farmers are up for grabs. The interesting thing about this auction is that the higher the bidding goes, the more farmers will pay off in the following income phase and the less some of the fixed-income properties will pay. The difference can be huge; a low bid and the farmers will pay only 1, quite probably not enough to cover their cost; a high bid and they can pay 3-4, which is a considerable windfall if you've invested in them. As with many Knizia games, the key seems to be not to be too far against the grain; if you build too many farmers and everyone else doesn't, yours will likely not pay much.

After recieving income, you do the property auction/building/harvest cycle twice more before scoring. Then things get really interesting; everything on the board gets cleared off except for the pyramids, and you start (almost) from scratch again; so if you build aggressively in the first round, but didn't save any money, someone else may likely benefit from all the pyramids you laboriously constructed in the first round.

Despite an ongoing 8-year process of becoming slightly jaded about new euro games, I quite liked Amun-Re. It is definitely a well-executed, more substantial game, something we've been in desperate need of since burnout on Puerto Rico has set in (and somthing of which the Europeans seem to be producing fewer of late). Taken as a whole, it's definitely a very different game, quite distinct from previous Knizia games. Although the mechanism is unique, the auctions will still feel vaguely familiar, but Amun-Re definitely has a kingdom-building and economic feel that is unusual in Knizia's games. The halftime clearing of the board is a nice touch too, as it cuts into the runaway leader problem that more economic games usually have. And the "harvest" auction which both allocates resources and sets various income levels is clever, I thought.

All in all, a lot to like and fans of Knizia's bigger games should be quite happy, for a little while anyway.