Players: 2-4
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
This is a review of the English edition of the game, which was simultaneously produced in German by Hans im Gluck.
The Components
Attika comes with:
- 22 game board tiles
- 4 shrines
- 4 player boards
- 120 buildings tiles
- 60 landscape cards
- 15 amphoras
- 1 rulebook
Game Board Tiles: These "super hexes" each contain 7 hexes: one central and six around it. They're printed on sturdy, linen-textured cardboard. Many of the hexes are blank, but others contain terrain marked with one of the four landscape symbols: water, forest, hill, or mountain. I'm a bit sad that these weren't printed with different super hexes on either side, as that would have doubled the number of available tiles to create random boards with; instead the back is wasted with a colored pattern.
Shrines: These three-dimensional pieces contain a 2-D shrine slotted onto a 2-D hex. They're printed full color on linen textured cardboard, just like the game board tiles, and they indeed go at the edges of the game board. Although the 3-Dness of the shrines is cute, some wobble about in their slots and try and fall out.
Player Boards: Cardstock boards, one for each player: Sparta (yellow), Athens (cyan), Thebes (red), and Corinth (olive). Each one shows the thirty building tiles and how they relate to each other. There's also info on what you can do during the turn. It's a great reference, and also a nice holder for your unused building tiles (though some way to mark the buildings that have already been placed would have been a great addition).
Building Tiles: There are 120 of these circular "pogs", 30 in each color. Each one is printed full color on linen-textured cardboard. It shows the name of the building (e.g., "ship"), a picture, and what's required to build it (e.g., "1 water, 2 forests").
Landscape Cards: Each of these 60 cards shows one of the four landscape types (water, forest, hill, mountain), against a correctly colored but otherwise non-descript background. An icon for the landscape also appears at all four corners, making the cards very easy to read when they're fanned out.
Amphoras: Small wooden vases (in 2D), painted orange.
Rulebook: A four-page book that does a great job of explaining the rules, including plenty of examples, and one of my favorite features ever, a section labeled "Reminder! Things Often Forgetten in a First Game". A terrific production.
Box & Tray: A medium-large bookshelf box that isn't too much oversized for the components. It has a very nice tray with shaped spaces for the various components, including individual spaces for each player's buildings. Unfortunately the very nice tray has one major problem: the slot for the cards isn't wide enough, and thus you can't put your cards in with them getting bent. Whoops.
Overall, the components for Attika are all very high quality and generally very easy to use. If there's anything missing from the game's components, it's only an inherent beauty. The pieces are all nice enough, but ultimately somewhat utilitarian. The game earns an above average "4" out of "5" for Style, on the whole.
The Gameplay
In Attika your goal is to construct your 30 buildings faster than any of your opponents.
About the Buildings: The core of Attika's gameplay is, clearly, the buildings. There are 30 total, each of which lists between 1 and 5 resources that are required to build the building. The Fountain, for example, just takes a water, while the Village takes water, forest, hill, and mountain. As another example, the Silver Mine takes two hills and two mountains. Finally, the Streets are special buildings, which require a total of five resources of any type.
All of the buildings are further organized into groups. The smallest group is the Mint group, which just contains the Silver Mine and the Mint. The largest group is the City group which contains ten different buildings. There are seven groups in all (Supply, Defense, Vineyard, City, Mint, Shipping, and Roads).
Finally, each group is arranged into a hierarchy which depicts the optimal way to build the buildings. In each group one building is a main/black building, and it's the root of its hierarchy. Every other building in the group has some building as its parent, going back to that main building. For example, the Supply group is a simple line. The Fountain is the main building, and that's the parent of the Corn Field, which is the parent of the Mill, which is the parent of the Village. The City, on the other hand, is a web. There's a main building the City (Sparta, Athens, etc.) and there are six buildings which are its children (Plaza, Tavern, Theater, Oracle, Statue, Gym). Further: the Plaza is the parent of the Market; the Gym is the parent of the Stadium; and the Statue is the parent of the Temple.
The only exception to this main/children hierarchy is the Streets group. There are four Streets, each of which is a parent of one other. It's a little circular hierarchy.
This is all laid out extremely clearly on the player boards, and is very important to building.
Setup: A central map is laid out by grouping together either 4, 6, or 8 tiles, depending on the number of players (2-4). This is done randomly, and so the board is different every time. Between 2-4 shrines are put in the corners of the board, again based on the number of players.
Each player then separates his 6 main buildings from his 24 other buildings. They're each shuffled, then arranged in four face-down stacks of 6 (main), 8, 8, and 8. Each player takes the top building for each stack and puts it on his player board.
Finally, the 60 landscape cards are shuffled: the first player draws 4, the next 5, the next 6, etc. (the idea being to offset any advantage of going first).
Order of Play: On his turn, each turn a player takes a choice between two main actions:
- Build Buildings; or
- Draw Buildings
Afterward he may also have the opportunity to
- Draw Cards
Build Buildings: If a player takes this action, he may build up to 3 buildings on his turn. You build a building by taking it off your player board, paying the resources shown on the building, then placing it on the map. There are two ways to reduce the resource cost: building in order; and building near resources.
Building in Order. If you've already built the parent building, and you place the child building adjacent to it, the child building costs no resources (except for additional settlement costs: see below).
Building Near Resources. Alternatively, when you place your building you may reduce its costs by any visible resources on the boards, either under where you plan to place the new building or adjacent to that space. So, if I build a Fortress, which costs three mountains and a hill, on a mountain and next to another, I'd only have to pay one mountain and one hill.
There's also one way to increase the cost of a building:
Forming a New Settlement: Each group of connected buildings of your color forms a settlement. Each time you form a new settlement (by placing a building not connected to any of your other buildings), you must pay an additional cost in cards equal to the settlement number minus one. So, if I already had two groups of disconnected buildings, and then I put that aforementioned Fortress down not adjacent to them, I'd have to pay that hill, plus that mountain, plus two other cards of my choice.
Finally, there's two additional rewards you can get from building:
Completing a Group: If you complete a group of buildings as depicted on your player board, and they're all connected to one another (not necessarily in the parental/child order shown on your card), you get an amphora. This little wooden token means you get an extra action during any of your turns (when you spend the amphora): if you were building, you may build one more; if you were drawing buildings, you may draw one more; and as we'll see shortly you may also take one more card.
Connecting the Shrines: If you connect any two of the shrines, which you'll recall are arranged at the corners of the board, through a continuous linkage of buildings in your color, you instantly win the game.
Overall, these rules define how the game plays. You're doing your best to optimize your building through playing your buildings in order, together, and on good resources. But, that's restricted by never knowing which buildings will come up next. You only have those four on your card at start. As for how to get more ...
Draw Buildings: Instead of building buildings, you may instead draw up to 2 buildings. This means that you get to, one at a time, take two buildings from any of your draw stacks. Once you see each building you may immediately: place the building on your player board, for use on a future turn; or else immediately build it, using all the regular rules.
Whenever you empty one of your draw piles, something else happens too: you randomly take one of the unused game board hexes and place it on the central map, so it's connected to one or more hexes (or shrines). This gives more room to expand, and often allows tricky ways to try and get a shrine-to-shrine connection through.
Draw Cards: At any time you may decide to stop drawing or building buildings, and instead draw landscape cards for each of your remaining actions. Thus you can draw 3 landscape cards on a turn, or build 1 building then draw 2 cards, or draw 1 building then draw 1 card, etc.
Winning the Game: When someone has placed all 30 of their buildings or completed a shrine-to-shrine connection, they win the game.
Relationships to Other Games
Although it has some facade of a resource collection game, I'd actually call Attika a connection-building game with very unique mechanisms for determining connection costs. You could compare it to Alan Moon's Ticket to Ride.
Both games heavily favor connections, but don't necessarily require them, and both games allow ways for players to get in the way of each other (though Attika is tighter than the tightest Ticket to Ride game). Ticket to Ride centers building on fairly simple set collection, while Attika uses a more complex formulaic system with several methods to make those formulas cheaper. On the whole, Ticket to Ride is simpler and more colorful, while Attika is more abstract yet more strategic.
The Game Design
Attika is a game that looks very simplistic, and indeed is simple to play, but still has a fair amount of strategic depth of play. Here's some of the best parts of play:Great Tactics: Every turn you have meaningful decisions you can make which will have real effects on the outcome; like the best tactical games, play feels very much like a puzzle from turn to turn.
Good Interactivity: The board is usually very tight, and this forces interaction with your opponents.
Quick & Short: Attika fits pretty well as a filler game, and yet is fairly dense strategically for that category of play.
Here's the one thing I didn't like:
Hard to Remain Ahead: There's a fairly serious "attack the leader" component, which comes out of the strong interactivity, and that can be a bit frustrating, if you're ahead, and have everyone gang up on you.
Overall, Attika is a somewhat abstract, very tactical game. There's some nice color, but it's really just skin-deep, and the core of the game centers around figuring out how to make best use of your resources and thus most efficiently build your connected buildings, preferably with minimum interfererence from your opponents. As such, it features above-average play, thus earning a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
If you're looking for a game rich with mythological Greek history, this ain't it. Attika is instead a well-designed, yet short, tactical game, which is great if you want to spend a bit of time flexing your abstract muscles in between even more serious fare.
