3rd Aug 2024 Games Day - Antiquity
by Robin. Sat, 3 Aug (Updated at Sat, 3 Aug)How many of us have played Antiquity? For a 20-year-old game it continues fairly high on BGG's rankings, and I can see from the club guild's collection that we have 4 copies between us; so maybe a few. It was new to me, but unlike Mosaic earlier in the week, which everyone else has been playing for the last couple of months, I can sound reasonably clued-up about this one.
We were a bunch of city states, in (I think) pre-Reformation Italy. Officially the aim was to be the best civilisation, obstruct the others and achieve our own specific win conditions first - so in that sense a bit like our chronological successor Here I Stand, which was being played downstairs. But practically the aim was to stay alive and not run out of food and building space, which we only partially managed.
It's ultimately an engine building game, but with the rather nice twist that, the bigger it gets, the more your engine tries to tear itself to pieces before you can use it. The engine harvests resources, which come from the land around your cities; but each resource you farm/fish/mine leaves the land barren and useless afterwards. So your countryside steadily fills up with this "pollution", while your cities fill up with graves, for all the people you don't manage to feed. The idea is that this forces you all into a race for building space, while also racing to complete your victory conditions.
That was the idea. Unfortunately, the starting setup means that you spend at least the first half of the game playing your own individual game with almost no interaction with other players. Possibly with 4 pros it would have been different; but only one of us had ever played the game before, and so it took us a while to get into a position where our territories overlapped. The Splotter game I know best is Bus, which is dominated by player interaction; and I was a bit disappointed to spend so long effectively playing a solo game in this one.
So the main benefit of playing it in a group was the great company. And also the fact that we could all talk about what we were doing and learn from one another's mistakes. And of course the usual Splotter challenge of ambiguous bits in the rulebook: there were several points for which we found different interpretations, and had to go to the BGG forum to find the designers' clarifications.
I had to leave at 4:30. Having started at 9:30, with an hour's break for Ousebank House's excellent breakfast, we were not finished by then. We had chosen to skip Karen's suggestion of a trial round, which was probably a good thing - for the rest of us, anyway - as she died first. Steve was on the point of dying soon after, which would have just left me and Claire to fight it out for the win. Which prompts a strategy tip not mentioned in Splotter's own offering: get the buildings that allow you to re-use the space.
For the record, those thematically-dubious buildings are the dump, which just absorbs a load of pollution; the alchemist, which revitalises spent fields and mines; and the hospital, which brings people back from the dead. Or as Karen suggested, digs them up and uses them for research - though I think that may in fact have only started after the Reformation. I think that's another Splotter speciality - the thematic dubiousness? We also had woodcutters who needed wood before they could chop any wood, and miners with the Midas touch, who on their say-so could turn an entire mountain range to gold so that it no longer contained any stone at all.
Anyway, Claire was onto these space-savers early on, and never seemed short of space despite not expanding her territory much. I got by more on expansion, but gradually learned from her example and built them too. Eventually, having avoided the early-death challenge, it looked like the size of our territory did eventually become important, as Claire looked further from her win condition than I did at the end. But either way, we both didn't die, which felt like a victory.
We mostly said we would like to try the game again. I do like the mechanic where, the more you produce, the less space you have to do anything else. And I think if we had been a bit more sensitive to the early pitfalls we would have got through the solo phase quicker. But that long solo phase is the killer for me - games should be about interaction between the players, and for me there wasn't enough of that.
Also at games day this month we had Through The Ages, and a table who hadn't booked a game in advance - I think I saw them playing Modern Art at one point. And Interstellar, a kickstarter that Paul brought along with some very bulky-looking planets/stars on the board. No idea how that went - they seemed quite engrossed in it every time I went past. And Ark Nova: Marine Worlds - which sounds thrematically dubious in the Splotter tradition, since you wouldn't really put fish in an ark. Or rather there's no actual ark in Ark Nova, so I guess it's fine.