Archaeological Find

So, I received a couple of new board games for Christmas this year. Fortunately, they didn't throw the whole "play all my board games" thing into too much chaos -- I got to play both of them tonight. One of the two was specifically recommended to me by friend, blog frequenter, and game enthusiast, FKL: Thebes.

The game is about going on archaeological expeditions. You must first spend time in Europe going from city to city, gathering research on the five possible dig sites you can excavate. The more knowledge you acquire, the more chances you will have at pulling chips from a bag when you get to the dig site. Think of that "Three Strikes" game on The Price is Right; the bag starts out with about a 50/50 ratio of chips worth victory points and worthless debris. After you pull, you keep your point chips, but throw the debris back in the bag, which thus gets progressively worse as the game goes on.

The rather clever system about the game, though, is its use of time as a resource. This in particular was the thing FKL recommended to me. The track around the outside of the game board does not represent points, but the number of weeks in a year. Every action you can take in the game takes up a variable number of "weeks" to complete it. When it's your turn, you move your marker up the number of weeks appropriate to your action, and then you sit back and wait for your next turn. The player who has advanced the least on the year-long track always goes next. If you take little actions that consume few weeks, you might find yourself taking several turns in close proximity -- or even consecutively. More costly actions take more weeks; you might be able to do something big to net a bunch of victory points, but then you'll find yourself not taking another turn for a little while. It's a very clever system, and provides the real meat in the game.

There is a bit of a drawback, but FKL warned me of this one too. Luck can play a factor in the game, partly in the order that cards come off the deck, but also in how you pull from the excavation bags. Not only might you come up with worthless debris, but different point chips are worth different values. I know it's not at all fair to judge the game on the single play I've now had, but my impression of that one play is that the "luck factor" is perhaps comparable to Settlers of Catan.

In any four-player Settlers game I've ever taken part in, one of the four players just gets shafted by die rolls early on, and can never really recover. He finishes the game with half a winning total of points (or less), and is generally a miserable prop for the other players to wield on their own way to victory. In our three-player game of Thebes, I won with 81 points. Second place was very much in the running with 75. Third place, shafted by bad bag pulls, had barely over 50.

But I will say that I enjoyed the game more than I enjoy a game of Settlers these days. Thebes seems to have a swift enough pace that if luck implodes your game (and it's not necessarily true that it must always hurt some player in every game), you aren't suffering for long. And the fun you seem to have if that doesn't happen more than makes up for it. The clever take on turn sequence, and using "time" as a game resource, is enough to put it over the top for me.

I wouldn't call Thebes a top favorite or anything, but I am looking forward to trying it again. It was definitely a solid recommendation, and I in turn will pass it on to you.