Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes

The Components

Sumeria comes in a surprisingly small box with a set of good-quality components:

Board: A small linen-textured four-panel board depicting the cities of Sumeria. It's divided into cities, towns, and villages (which are easily distinguishable) and connected by roads. When you first look at the board you'll probably get the idea that the game is largely an abstract, and that's indeed the case. The board does a good job of showing you your possibilities for play, but other than that is pretty plain.

Cardboard Bits: There are 36 influence counters (divided between economic, military, political, and religious tiles) all printed on small, linen-textured cardboard tiles. They're attractive with nice pictures for each of the tile types.

There are also eight larger city-state tiles. Each one very clearly identifies one of the city-states on the board using a miniature map.

Bag: A bag used to hold the influence counters (so that you can randomly draw them).

Wooden Bits: The 56 trader markers (divided among red, yellow, blue, and black) don't look like traders since they're wooden octagons--but that's pretty common for a Euro Game of this sort. Two wooden pawns are used to mark the current turn and the current start player.

Overall the components for Sumeria are all good-quality and have good usability. Most of the pieces are just average in beauty, but I think the influence markers are quite nice.

My only real complaint about Sumeria is that it's on the expensive side for its size. Nonetheless, it's a nice production, and I've still let it eke in a "4" out of "5" for Style: good.

The Gameplay

The object of Sumeria is to gain the most points through the control of Sumerian city-states over the course of six rounds of play. The trick is that the value of those city-states rises and falls.

Setup: Lay out the board and give each player 10-14 traders (depending on the number of players. Shuffle up the 8 city-state tiles and lay them down in a random order: this track will show the initial order of ascendency.

Draw six influence counters from the bag and place them above the first three city-states: the ascendent city-states gets three, the next two, and the third city-state just one.

Then, over the course of several rounds (depending on the number of players), place trader markers one at a time in the empty cities, towns, or villages of Sumeria.

Now regular play begins.

Order of Play: There are six rounds in the game. Over the course of each round, each player will take three actions (one at a time), then the city-states will score and the round will end.

Taking Actions: Whenever a player takes an action, he has one of three choices:

Add a Trader. Add a trader to an empty city, town, or village on the board. When you do so, move the appropriate city-state tile up on the ascendency track, exchanging it with the tile directly above it.

Move a Trader. Move one of your traders to the next empty space on a road (possibly bypassing one or more filled space). If your trader moved into a new city-state, move the appropriate city-state tile up on the ascendency track, exchanging it with the tile above.

Remove a Trader. Take one of your traders from the board, moving the tile of the city-state that the trader came from down on the ascendency track, exchanging it with the tile below.

Scoring the City-States: Now, the top three city-states score. In each case, you determine the two players with the most traders in city-state. Ties are broken by preferential placement in cities and towns.

In the most influential city-state the first-place player takes two of the three influence tiles, while the second-place player gets what's left. In the second-most influential city-state, the first-place player gets one of the two influence tiles, with the second-place player getting what's left. In the third-most influential city-state, the first-place player gets the one and only influence tile.

Ending a Round: Now the top three city-state tiles are removed from the top of the ascendy track and placed at the bottom in reverse order. A new first player is chosen based on which players had the least influence in the formerly top city states.

Ending the Game: After six rounds of play, the game ends. Players get exponentially increasing points depending on how many tiles they had in each individual type of influence, earning 1/3/6/10/15/21/28/36/45 for 1-9 tiles. Each player adds up all his points, and the player with the highest total wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Sumeria is broadly a majority-control game with a pretty big twist: the players can control the values of the various majority-control areas. I've certainly seen such an idea before, such as in Michael Schacht's classic China, where the value of areas increases as pieces are put in, but it's rare that it's such a gameable system, as is the case in Sumeria.

The Game Design

I like Sumeria. The interplay between piece placement, piece movement, and scoring creates for some interesting tactical dynamics. Each action you try to balance majority control with area value, and at the same time you try to do it without hurting the value of your other areas.

However, I also think that Sumeria is a game where it's a bit challenging to find the right group to play it.

You could play it really lightly, where everyone makes quick moves and doesn't worry too much about the long-term results of their moves. As such, the game moves along quickly and is quite enjoyable. If you have a group that won't overthink things, you need read no further: Sumeria will be a great filler for you.

On the other hand you could play Sumeria as a dense and thoughtful abstract, carefully considering the majority-control and area-value results from each and every game move. There's certainly enough tactical possibility to support this type of play, but I'm not convinced the game has enough depth for this sort of introspection to be worthwhile; instead the game can outstay it's welcome.

The worst case is probably when a group mixes players of both types, where some will want to think things out and some will want to play quickly. This issue actually created a bit of spirited discussion in one of my game groups where we talked about whether that disconnect is a fault of the game or the players (which I won't take a side with) and whether Sumeria raises the problem more than most other games (which I think it does).

Overall, I'm going to rate Sumeria at its best. As a light filler game where players play quickly, it's original, tactical, and interesting, and under those conditions I give it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

An innovative and quick majority-control game--provided that you have players who won't get bogged down by the possibility of increased tactical depth.