Phoenicia is now available for play online. To play, go to http://www.jklminteractive.co.uk and download the JKLM Interactive Windows Client. Then create an account on the server, and you're ready to play.

Setting up an account is free. Playing Phoenicia is free at present, and will continue to be so until the boardgame version is released.

David.

I've downloaded the client and registered, since I'm very interested in the game. My problem now is leaning to play. Are the rules available online?

http://ellought.demon.co.uk/jklm/phoenicia.php
is an overview of the rules; it was enough to get me going, but I've played Outpost.

The information there is meant to be sufficient to play the game online. There are a lot less rules there than in the boardgame rulebook, but of course, you've got the computer to enforce a lot of the rules, so they don't need to be written down as well.

If there is anything missing, let me know and I can add it - although I am aware that the more I write, the less chance that people will read and remember it!

David.

"Here's some of the rules. Learn the rest by figuring out what the game will and will not allow to do."

What??? Why not just post the damn rules? Otheriwse, no thanks.

I can't speak for JKLM directly, but I can say that I am working with them to finalize the rules for publication, given minor rules tweaks that resulted from their playtesting and co-publisher input. I suspect in a couple of weeks, things will become a lot more stable on the rules front.

Thanks, Tom!

Will future versions feature playing against bots?

Server is down for the second day

The web page claims that it will be down until Thursday.

Jim, the damn rules have been posted here at the Phoenicia entry on the Geek (thanks, Markus!). Hope that helps.

Hopefully it's not the final rules, as there's is one error in an example (min bid for Glassmaking is 5, but in example it's bought for 4) plus that there is no explanation when and how the "City center" is used to buy VP's.

In any case I've played it 5 times online now, although only one 3-player and the rest were 2-player. This is really a great game, which I've now pre-ordered.

My first fear is the catch-the-leader problem, but according to David it's mainly a problem in 2-player games. In any case the last 3 games were very tight and if you have a lot of VP, then you probably don't have enough income. It's also quite short (max 30 minutes 2-player online when you start to get a hang of it) and I'm sure it will be less than 90 minutes with 5 players.

The main problem might be that you have an initial threshold to know and understand the interaction of all the cards, which might frighten some occasional gamers. On the other hand it's very rewarding when you start to understand them. Initially I will rate it 9, but need to play it in real life and with more players before make a decision.
/Carl

That link didn't work for me but there is a summary at http://www.diplom.org/~davidn/jklm/phoenicia.php

And, for anyone interested, it looks like the client works fine under wine-0.9.33; I just played a couple of turns with DavidNorman99 with no problem.