Egypt Me

There are a lot of board games in my collection by designer Reiner Knizia, but not all of them are in heavy rotation for one reason or another. One, Amun-Re, had actually not been touched in years. I picked it up shortly before moving back to Colorado a few years back, and several moves just relegated it to the bottom of the heap until this year's "try to play every game I own" challenge.

It turns out it's a pretty good game, and has now popped up a few times in the last couple of weeks. It's another Egyptian-themed game from Knizia, this one with perhaps slightly better use of the theme than many of his efforts. In Amun-Re, players take turns bidding against each other to acquire different provinces in ancient Egypt. They then spend to develop the provinces they acquire by bringing in farmers, building pyramids, and taking actions leading to two point scoring intervals in the game.

The twist comes at "half time," after the game's first scoring interval. All the ownership markers denoting who controls which province are wiped away... but the developments players have put in place are not. In the second half of the game, auctions begin anew, with players acquiring provinces a second time. They might not gain control of the same places they had in the first half. But they may instead take control of more richly developed territory that was built up first by a rival.

The turn sequence is pretty smooth. The game isn't too deeply demanding in strategy, but does offer a good amount of depth for its simplicity and fairly short run time. It does lack in paths to victory. There really aren't that many ways to score points, so one game (in my admittedly limited experience) doesn't play out so very differently from the next.

Still, it seems to offer some good fun in a "middle of the game night" sort of way -- for those times when no one is looking for a long and involved option, but neither are they ready to pull out something truly brainless. You might find it worth a look.