Played

An exciting game! Sam and I pursued very similar strategies, variations on the famous BRICs (Beer, Rail, Iron, Coal) approach. This

• prioritizes high-value rail locations

• uses iron and beer to build industry in the Canal era for the double points (level II and above count twice)

• uses coal and iron income to offset borrowing needed for an aggressive rail strategy

• uses beer to gain opportunities for double-rail actions

Zev tried something I've wondered about: an all-out pottery strategy. He understood that its success hinged on getting as much pottery out as possible in the Canal era and got quite far. This probably warrants a close analysis and would probably only work in a three-player game, with the extra turn over a four-player game.

A close game, even closer because we forgot the rule that "you cannot play 2 identical Favor cards during the same phase or during Scoring". Had we remembered, the final score would have been 40-40-36-32. That rule, which may seem an afterthought, is designed to limit the game's volatility. Volatility, driven primarily by the prominent role of bonus or favor cards, is one reason my enthusiasm for the game is waning. The other, I think, is that Amun-Re is largely buy-buy-buy-sacrifice. The two-phase structure (Old Kingdom - New Kingdom) doesn't help because almost nothing changes. The mechanics of play are the same; the only differences are the presence of pyramids on the provinces and, usually, more money in players' hands.

Revenge is a new edition of Auztralia in which one player represents the Old Ones, the aliens who ruled Earth but are now confined to Australia. The other players represent humans trying to reclaim the land. The default scenario makes victory by the human players too easy, or at least too likely (the outcome is sensitive to the specific Old One tiles drawn at random for a game), so we increased the difficulty for the human players by removing all the dummy Old One tiles (the kangaroos) and ensuring that Cthulhu, the most daunting Old One, was included.

We lost, and for a familiar reason: the Old One player successfully targeted an isolated player. Based on the scoring system, the Old Ones are likely to win if they destroy a player's port, a game ending condition which happened here. We didn't compute the final score because the Old Ones' victory was not in doubt. The challenge of winning for the human players is that they must position their ports within minimum distance to provide maximum mutual support even though doing so makes acquiring resources through building rail networks and mining less efficient. We positioned closer than usual but not as close as possible.

Both times we've played Revenge, the Old Ones easily won by picking-off one player relatively early in the game.

The Old Ones early victory gave us the chance to play a second game, this time the original semi-cooperative game using the Western Auztralia board. As a reminder, the game is semi-cooperative because one player can win, but all players lose if the Old Ones win. We were more successful this time and the game reached the end point (53) on the time track. But the Old Ones won again, though barely. As before, we increased the difficulty by eliminating all the dummy Old One tiles.

What the second loss showed is that players must be sufficiently adept militarily not only to avoid individual defeat (loss of their port) but to collectively eliminate nearly all the Old Ones prior to reaching the end point on the time track. It may be that even one player pursuing a pacific strategy (stay back and build farms) or simply being ineffective at their military buildup and campaigning is enough to ensure defeat, especially at higher levels of difficulty.

This game was played in Eugene, Oregon during my visit there. I was fortunate to be joined by very experienced Tigris & Euphrates players, Eric and Jeff, who also happened to be mathematicians. It was an exhilarating and difficult game marked by a greater profusion of monuments than I'd ever seen before (5 of the 6 possible). Monuments dramatically increase the game's volatility. Players must achieve roughly equal access to monument output either by increasing their gains or reducing that of their opponents. Most of the allotment of catastrophe tiles were also deployed, precisely because they are a quick, if brutal, way to deprive another player of monument access. Jeff did a fantastic job of sustaining monument output and won with 14 points; the rest of us scored 11, 10, and 8.

A challenge in highly interactive multi-player strategy games is recognition of when, and how, players may need to temporarily ally to prevent a run-away leader. This problem, obviously unique to multi-player games, probably doesn't get the attention it deserves, perhaps because it may feel somehow "unfair". But it's intrinsic to such games and actually critical to successful advanced play. In this instance, Eric and I were too slow to cooperate, which facilitate Jeff's win.

Also of note, there are probably only two ways five monuments get built: inattention (not noticing when another player is on the threshold of achieving a square of same-type tiles) or a permissive approach (focusing on building 'your' own monuments instead of blocking someone else). I suspect that it was not optimal (except for Jeff) that so many were built in this game.

Playing the game reinforced our collective recognition of what an extraordinary design T&E is. There's an incredible diversity of both tactical and strategic possibilities and a tremendous sense of fluidity, dense interaction, and unpredictability that never goes away. There aren't many games that are, time and again, so exhilarating and mentally exhausting to play.