A Time of Antiquity

In the era of social distancing, Board Game Arena has been a place to try out a bunch of different board games that are new to me, simply because they're the games the site had available. A few have been great discoveries. A few were good enough, at least, to pass the time until we could eventually play our old standbys in person again. Then there was the utterly forgettable...

The Builders: Antiquity is a fast-paced monument building game distilled down to a deck of cards and a half hour play time. A shuffled deck of structure cards are the things you can build, with a few face up in a row available at any one given time. A separate shuffled deck of workers are how you build them, with a few of those available face up in a row. During your turn, you get 3 "free actions" to work with, drafting workers, drafting buildings, or paying a worker's cost to assign them to a building you have in front of you.

There are four different skills needed on buildings and provided by workers (in various combinations); when you've assigned enough workers in total to meet a building's requirements, you flip it over for its points. You have to manage having enough money on hand to pay your workers, but essentially -- the engine building is the game. There are a few wrinkles here in there such as buying and assigning tools to upgrade workers, hiring slaves at a point penalty (but also potentially educating and freeing them later), and buildings that provide skills of their own once complete. But the wrinkles are pretty minor.

I hesitated to write anything at all about this game. I did not do so quickly in the aftermath of playing it, and now, beyond a few hastily scribbled notes I took at the time, I find I barely remember anything about it. It simply didn't make much of an impression at all; it was certainly not memorable or interesting enough to seem worth playing again, nor was it bad enough for any enormous flaws to stick in my mind.

Really, I felt it was so chaotic as to be nearly random. The game essentially comes down to "what's face up in the rows for you to take on your turn?" If you're lucky enough that the workers and buildings line up with each other (or the workers you already have on hand), the game provides no friction at all and rolls out a red carpet for you to walk to victory. If you happen to be after the same skills the player in front of you also happens to need, you're going to struggle at every turn -- and you won't be able to do much even if you recognize the problem, because the game is too short, taking too few turns, for you to really change direction midstream. Watching what other players are doing and trying to block and/or avoid them seems to be the strategic intent here, but in a game this short and this straightforward, it feels like it really needs to be 1-on-1 for that to work; with the full count of four players, someone is just plain going to get lucky and win.

There was one mechanic in here that I generated some modest interest. It involved being able to take more than your allotted 3 free actions on your turn, by paying a hefty cost that kept scaling up if you wanted to take a 4th, 5th, or (probably too expensive to be possible) 6th action. I mean, it sounded intriguing at the time, I remember -- a sort of thing I felt like could be siphoned off into some other more compelling game. But in keeping with the generally forgettable nature of this game, I now can't even remember exactly how it worked. (And it really hasn't been that long since I played.) Must not have been that compelling after all.

It's possible this is a game that doesn't make the hop to online implementation on Board Game Arena very well, and that it's more compelling with a physical copy. And like I mentioned above, it's also possible that it's better suited to two players. But with so many other great games out there, I just don't see much of a need to ever come back to this one. I give The Builders: Antiquity a C-.