Its Time 4 Games Issue 5

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This issue was dedicated entirely to a big game - Age of Mythology.

Age of Mythology

Eagle Games

http://www.eaglegames.net/

This is a rescource gathering and building game set in the ancient/ mythis world. Players control Norse, Greek or Egyptian civilisations.
Each player has a board with holding, production and city areas.

The game contains attractive wooden cubes to represent resources -Wood. food, gold and the favour of the gods. There also have cubes for victory points.
There are also hundreds of quite nice military units - some mortal and some mythic in different colours and types for each nation.
There are production tiles. These represent areas producing one or two cubes of one of the types of resources and come in different terrain area . Thus there are mountain tiles, hills, desert and fertile. YOu may only place  atile in the right terrain. Players must exercise jufgement as the tiles come u. There is  a decision often to be made between taking whats available immediatley and passing over tiles in the hope of better ones later.

There are building cards. Buildings give advantages in the game. They are placed in cities.
There are action cards. Permament ones are always available to be playes each turn but there are also randomn ones which are more powerful but and unknown quanity.
There are army cards which are used in combat and sumarise each units strengths and abilties.

Finally there are 4 victory point cards which are used  for players to place VP cubes on as they see fit. There is Largest Army, Most buildings, The Wonder and Won last battle. Each turn starts with players placing VP cubes on the cards in turn.

The game is played until the last VP cube is placed or until the wonder is built.

In a turn players choose 4 action cards and get to play 3 of them . Each player plays 1 card in turn.

The Actions include:

Explore: Used to select more production tiles and place them in the production areas.
Gather: Used to gain  production cubes from your production tiles

Trade: Exchange cubes for different ones from the back - at  a cost.
Build: Used to build  buildings in the town.
Recruit: Train up more army units
Attack: Attack another player.
Next Age: Advance the age of your civilisation through the 4 ages-Archaic to Heroic.
This gives you more actions cards each turn and is neccesary to enable the building of the wonder.

When combat occurs each player chooses a battle card for a unit in the battle and reveals it at the same time. They then work out how many dice they get and roll them. Most 6's wins! If youwin you take  a production tile, detroy a building or take resouces.

When the turn in which the last VP cubes have been placed end - or the turn when the wonder is built ends you then tot up VP. The Largest Army, MOst Buildins and Built Wonnder VP cubes that have been accumultaing all game on the cards are given out and added to any VPs won by winning battles.
The player with most VPs wins.

Its a good game but can take a while to play. Certainly allow 3 hours plus prob 30mins per extra player. It can be a bit abstract and combat is really just guess work and feels a bit like rock/paper/ scissor and can be rather random. But that said combat is  fast and fun.
Its a thinking game and can seem absract as playes do not advance across a map as such - its all played on each players boards - but again you get sued to that. Definately a game to invest a few hours and several goes at.

You can play with upto 8 players with 2 sets or ordering extra units.

My rating Players 1 NA 2 6/10 3-4 8/10 5-8 6/10

I have marked 2 player games down because the game works best with multiple players.  5 or more players will take  a LONG time.
£34.99