Harrowed Halls

This week we played another game set in the Greek isles, Parthenon. No man is an island, but in this game you are. Each player plays an island such as Crete, Chios, or Rhodes. Your goal is to be the first to complete all of your structures in the span of the three years. Each year has four seasons and each season has 10 phases. The rulebook has 24 pages and there 1.2 billion cards that come with the game. Maybe is only seems like 1.2 billion–especially if your rubber bands dry out and break. Then when you open the box all 1.2 billion cards are all mixed together. Yes there are a lot of cards and rules, but there are also a lot of player-created games aids out there on the net. I downloaded them all. Some are quite useful. My favorite is a pdf of fold up boxes for you to print, cut, fold, & paste together. Then you have something to put all those cards in. I didn’t do this. Way too much work. But I digress.

As I mentioned a while back the object is to build structures. You do this by producing and trading for various commodities. Each island produces its own set of commodities. The rest you can either trade for from other players or load your fleets up with them and set sail for faraway lands like Egypt or Italy. If you make it to these faraway lands, you get a much better return for trading. But the journey is fraught with hazards. And if you do make it to you chosen destination, you may find that there is a blockade at the harbor or worse. But we Greeks are a hardy bunch, so we sent the fleets out anyway.

Oh, I should mention about how our game started. Three islands are always used during game play. For a 4-player game, the fourth island is called the bonus island. That was Ben; he got a free army for being the bonus island. Mike and Owen got Gift of Poseidon cards because they matched something the bonus island had. And what did my island get? Zilch. So before we even started, I was behind and I stayed there the entire game. At first it seemed that it would be impossible to build all of the structures (6 Villages, 2 Workshops, 6 Acropolis Structures, and 2 Great Wonders) in three years. But each season there are event cards—some good, some bad. Clever use of these and various Harbor Status cards enables you to really clean house. Mike did a particularly great job of this. We all though Mike was the sure fire winner, but a Harbor status card right at the end of the game changed all that. In the end, Ben won. Mike and Owen were really close to him. Me, not so much. 

I think everyone liked this game. Me, not so much.