After the Flood is Martin Wallace's newest game produced under the Treefrog label. It's his most serious game thus far from the line, a 3-player game of warfare and resource management that runs two to three hours.
Players: Exactly 3
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
The Components
After the Flood comes in one of Warfrog's bookshelf boxe; as is the case with the entire Treefrog line, it's jam-packed with wooden components.
The Map: An attractive map of the Fertile Crescent, featuring artwork by Peter Dennis and graphic design by Solid Colour. It shows the central Sumerian lands as well as several outlying lands, from Egypt to Dilmun, which are the source of trade and invaders.
This map is also jam-packed with other information that you'll need to play the game, such as the value of goods, the formulae for trading, values for production, and information on upcoming empires.
Some of the information is even redundantly placed, such as the empire information, which appears in both the "Empires" box and on the game map--so that you can easily see both which empires are coming out soon and which spaces on the board correlate to those empires.
The overall result is a highly usable game that nonetheless manages to remain very good looking.
The Wood Bits: One of Treefrog's mantras is that all the components will be made of wood. Thus, this game comes with a huge mass of wood representing both the eight types of resources (grain, wood, textile, and metal, all represented as cubes, and tools, oil, gold, and lapis lazuli, all represented as discs) and the five types of player pieces (city bases, city expansion piecs, worker pieces, army pieces, and player game markers).
There's some nice nuances to these wood bits. For example, the city expansion bits go on top of the city bases to form little two-step ziggurats. The best pieces are doubtless the army pieces, which are cut to look like tower-shield bearing men.
The Rules: A 12-page full-color rulebook. It includes some nuances that have been in other Wallace games that I'm growing increasingly enamored with, notably: historical asides shown as callouts in the rules; a nice set of designer notes; a quick-reference guide; and a listing of "easy to forget rules".
Overall, After the Flood features the highest-quality components, attractive graphic design, and great usability (even though it's a relatively complex game). It earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of After the Flood is to earn the most points by rampaging about with armies and building great cities. There's also some end-game scoring for final worker placement.
Setup: Each player is given two workers, and a collection of resources: one wood, one metal, one tool, one oil, and one gold.
The Resources. There are eight resources in After the Flood: four materials and four finished goods. Each of those resources has a very specific value: grain is 1; wood, metal, and textiles are 2; tools and oils are 3; gold is 4; and lapis lazuli is 5. These values are applicable when resources are used for various reasons. In addition, certain goods can be traded for other goods, as is discussed more below.
Order of Play: There are five turns in After the Flood, each consisting of six phases.
- Collect Resources & Workers
- Decline
- Player Actions
- Determine Order
- Victory Points
- End of Turn
Collecting Resources: Each player gets to take grain and textiles depending on the number of workers they have in the Irrigation and Weaving worker boxes. The exact amount a player gets depends on placement (1st, 2nd, or 3rd) among the three players, with a little chart showing exactly what happens for all ties. For example, grain production goes from 5/5/5 (all tied) to 6/4/3 (three different placements) while textiles goes from 3/3/3 to 3/2/1. No workers start in these boxes, so the players won't get any of this production on the first turn.
Each player also gets eight workers (bringing their total to ten on the first turn).
Decline: During the second and fourth turns, decline occurs. This means that players lose workers. Everyone in the desert of Dilmuun is lost, while each player also loses one worker from each other on-board location. Finally in the aforementioned Irrigation and Weaver boxes, the first-place player drops down to two workers and everyone else loses a like amount.
Player Actions: This is the heart of the game. Everyone takes actions, one at a time. There are several options:
Build City. A player puts down a city in a Sumerian location without a city or any enemy armies.
Cities are necessary to earn victory points by later "expanding" them. Some of the cities also give bonuses that you can take advantage of during the game, such as earning extra resources or victory points.
Place Workers. A player places workers by spending a resource. He gets to place a number of workers equal to the value of his resource (from 1-5), all in one location.
Workers on the board have three purposes: they can be used to trade, they can be used to start empires, and (at the end of the game only) they can be worth victory points.
Workers can also be placed in one of four Worker Boxes. Workers placed in Irrigation and Weaving produce resources, as already noted. Workers placed in Scribing can later be used to place additional workers or move them (once per turn per scribe). Finally, workers placed in Tool Making can be used to turn metal into tools (again, once per turn per worker).
Trade. Many of the non-Sumerian board locations include one or more icons. These icons show wood, metal, oil, gold, or lapis lazuli, and they represent goods that you can trade for at those places. There's a little chart that shows what can be traded for what, but there are some general rules that are easy to intuit: you can only exchange grain for the two lowliest goods (wood and metal); you can exchange textiles for everything but lapis lazuli; and you can exchange tools for anything. There's also some opportunity to trade oils and gold for the very best finished goods.
When you take a trade action, you can trade on every space where you have workers, but in each space you can only trade once per worker and only once per icon, so that means that you'll usually only get to do one or two trades in a space.
There's one special case: army units block trades for all players in that space, though the player who owns the army units may use them to trade as if they were workers.
During a trade action you can also use unused tool-makers to turn metal into tools. And, all of this work can be done in an order of your choice, so you can for example trade grain for metal in Elam, convert it to tools with a toolmaker, then exchange that tools for lapis lazuli in Kassites (presuming you have workers in each of those spaces).
Start Empire. Each turn each player gets to start one empire (if he wants) from a menu of three. He does so by having at least as many workers as any one else in the empire's starting space. He then removes his workers from that space and takes between 3 and 12 army units from his supply (depending on the empire), 1 or 2 of which he puts in the starting space.
At the same time, the player may buy extra army units using grain, metal, or tools. He may also place a "bid" of resources in the army equipment ratings box of his color. This will make his army better or worse than other armies, depending on what other players bid.
Expand Empire. This is actually a collection of three actions which are put together because you can take number of them at once for a cost.
- You can expand your empire by either placing an army unit in an empty space or in a space with an enemy unit; the latter starts a fight where the attacker rolls two dice. He eliminates the defender with a 5 if his units are better equipped and a 7 if his units are worse equipped.
- You can fortify a position by adding a second unit.
- You can destroy a city in a space where you have units by sacrificing two of your available army units.
Pass. When you're done taking actions in an turn, you pass. Afterward any remaining actions taken by other players have an additional cost: for each action they take, they must sacrifice something (a worker, an army unit, a resource).
At the same time as you pass you may make a "bid" on turn order for next turn by placing resources in an appropriate space on the board.
Determine Order: After every one is done with actions, the turn order for the next turn is determined by what value of resources each player placed in the "passed" boxes.
Victory Points: Now players earn victory points. First they get 2 VPs for each space occupied by their armies. Second they can turn in resources to place an "expansion" marker on one (or more) of their cities that hasn't been expanded. This expansion costs 2 wood resources plus 0-4 luxury goods, which can't be duplicated. It earns from 4-20 VPs.
End of Turn: Players turn in any worker or army markers that they didn't use. All armies are also cleared from the board, as history slowly incorporates them into Sumerian civilization.
Ending the Game: The game ends after the fifth turn, but there's one additional scoring. Most of the non-Sumerian areas are worth 2-4 VPs, as are the Irrigation and Weaving boxes. If a player has a majority of worker pieces in one of those spaces, he gains the allotted points.
Relationships to Other Games
After the Flood is the second Treefrog game, following this summer's Tinners' Trail (which indeed also had lots of nice wooden bits. It's also a rare game that allows exactly three players. Lookout Games' The End of the Triumvirate is one of the few others that I've seen attempt it. However, it's apparently going to a regular sort of offering from Treefrog, as Wallace plans to do more of these.
The actual gameplay of After the Flood is split into two parts.
The war game system uses a similar model of rising and falling empires as classics History of the World and Vinci. It's used to good effect here, as it's what allows a three-player semi-war-game to really work. Because players can end up with arbitrarily located empires every turn, two players are unlikely to form long-term alliances against a third player.
The trading system is a relative rarity: a game where the players trade entirely with the game system, not with each other. However, I think the specific way in which it's designed is almost entirely unique. It takes you a while to get your head around the fact that your quantity of resources never increases, only their quality.
The Game Design
After the Flood is overall a well-designed gamers' game. I think it can be a little unintuitive a start, as you have many options and it's really not clear what's best to do, but as you become more familiar with the game, it becomes more obvious how to make good decisions.
(And watch for my strategy article at BoardGameNews, tentatively scheduled for January 22.)
There are really two different systems in the game: the conflict and the resources. However, it's very interesting how they interact. On the one hand you have to sacrifice your workers to generate armies and on the other hand moving your army into trading spaces can spoil them for other players. Individual turns can often become races against the clock, as armies appear and threaten your trading possibilities.
I find the trade system particularly clever. As I've already noted, I've never seen anything quite like it before. It often feels more like a puzzle, as you have to figure out how to climb the ladder of trade in such a way as to get the set of resources that you want in order to build a great expansion for a city.
It feels like there's a lot of hesitation in the game, which I don't entirely like. When you're not in danger from armies you'll often want to stall trades in order to try and go later than the other players, and thus have the last opportunity to move armies in a more meaningful way. The pass penalty helps account for this a little bit, but it still feels a little awkward to me.
However in general After the Flood is a sophisticated game with clever mechanics that allow for interesting strategy in a couple of orthogonal directions. I don't think it's got quite as much depth as some of Wallace's most complex games, like Brass and Byzantium, but it is still the deepest game that he's put out yet through Treefrog, and will please those players who were looking for the new Warfrog design in 2008.
For Substance I think it earns about a four-and-a-half and out of five--which isn't a rating available at RPGnet, so I've let it eke in a "5".
Conclusion
After the Flood is a well-themed and beautifully produced game about the rise and fall of civilizations in the Fertile Crescent. It includes a clever trading system that blends in interesting ways with a simple combat system--all in a package designed for exactly three players. It's Martin Wallace's best gamers' game of the year and a good addition to his library.
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