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Back on the 25th (day before Memorial Day), I had a couple people over for FtF gaming. Patch was originally scheduled to attend, but couldn’t make it, leaving me, Dave, Mark, and Jason to try out Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East.

It’s been a while, but we’ve played its brother game, Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea a few times, and I figured this would be easy to get into. I panicked when I looked at the rules that morning and realized I didn’t remember nearly as much as I thought, but looking at the actual game brought just about everything back, so it worked out.

Mark and I had gone over the playbook ahead of time, and we decided upon the Cyrus the Great scenario as the only four-player scenario that used the full map. (Maybe going for a more compact one would have been smarter as we needed a bit of the board to save table space as it was. Random draws for powers gave me the bullseye—I mean Babylon.

The other powers use the standard, somewhat compact, setups, but Babylon is specially ruled into occupying the entire fertile area in the middle of the board. The real changes in ACME are the terrain rules, and the fertile areas are really powerful, as you can just have camps and get growth, or, best of all, have cities to get VPs and get growth tokens. My initial growth was phenomenal, and only stalled out for one turn, when a horde of barbarians out of the deserts kept me from having control of a bunch of spaces. After that, they were largely cleared out, and my growth put me back into maxing out my tokens.

Mark had the Medes & Persians, and was a constant thorn in my side (as he should), but I didn’t have a lot of other troubles, so while he got more powerful as the game went on, he could never really challenge me in the Fertile Crescent for long. He also refused to join in on the initial rush to a religion, so he didn’t get VPs that way, and at the end of Epoch III (which the scenario starts in), he was trailing well behind in points.

Dave had the Lydian Kingdom, and Jason Egypt, and the two of them largely focused on each other, partially powered by Dave’s aggressively sea-oriented strategy. I was more focused on pure growth and managing my frontiers at first, so Dave also took a lead in cities, followed closely by Jason, and I slipped into third place.

We broke for a late-ish lunch at the end of Epoch III, and Epoch IV saw the earlier conflicts come into ever-sharper focus. Mark was getting his act together, and caught up to me in points (fueled by that bad turn of barbarians), and started catching up to the rest as well. I swept away the barbarians and concentrated on cities (and growth!) for a revival in the last two turns that put me near the lead again, but I didn’t quite catch up. Both Epochs ended after three turns, and IV ended with a Lydian (Dave) win at 36 VPs, Jason at 34, me at 33, and Mark at 27.

I think I like the long, skinny map set up of ACIS better, and I don’t see enough difference between the wonder and religion mechanics for it to matter. But, the terrain mechanics (including desert and mountain, which are also important) really makes ACME the better game in my view. The wealth of different civilizations also means there’s a lot of room for playing around with setups and mechanics.

We had time left over after that, so we tried Roach Party, which Dave had picked up on a whim a while back. It’s basically a custom dice game where of course you try to get rid of all your dice first. You’re all tenants in a cockroach-infested building, and you can end up putting dice in the middle of the board, handing them to someone else, or being forced to take more. There’s an overall status that changes every turn as well. It was kind of interesting, but the only decision making is who to hand some of your dice to. It’s probably worth what Dave paid for it, but only just. The game itself ended with the building condemned, and so a loss for everyone.

And after that, we did a round of Too Many Kobolds. It has been a few months, and I remembered a bit late that we’d actually played it while waiting for Dave last time, so he had no experience. That said, it went well, if a bit slow since there is a lot of brain-burn around figuring out just how to satisfy needs, and figuring out what needs can be met. In my case, I ended up with a pair -7s I just couldn’t make happy, and that sank my score too far.

All but Dave managed to have the eight kobolds around the dragon content to get the 10 point bonus. Jason scored 22 points thanks to a -7 and -5, and a couple of 0s, for a total of 32. Mark did a little better with -8 across three cards, and a mushroom bonus for a total of 44. I didn’t manage anything fancy, and everything was positive except the two -7s I mentioned, and ended up at 46. Dave, after a rough start, got all but one kobold content (-2), and had a bonus of two triples, for a final score of 47.

(Sadly, all my attempted photos cut one or two sides off the table.)