Alexander the Great is a majority-control & blind-bidding game by Ronald Hofstatter and Dietmar Keusch, published by Phalanx and distributed by Mayfair Games.
Players: 2-5
Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
Alexander the Great comes in a handsome gamebox with:
- 1 game board
- 75 resource markers
- 10 pawns
- 50 temples
- 40 cities
- 5 player boards
- 5 screens
- 1 player aid card
- 1 rules booklet
Game Board: An attractive four-panel, linen-textured board depicting the Middle east. Six color-coded regions are featured on the board, each broken into four or more provinces. These depict the locations through which Alexander the Great will campaign. Movement arrows, cities, temples, and campaign markers on the board all are easy to understand & make the game easy to play.
The game uses a rather unique mechanism where you're only playing on a small portion of the board (one of the regions) at any time. This is fine enough, except for the fact that, with all the pieces on one little region, things become very crowded. The wood cubes piled on the board make it hard to see province numbers and even city and temple icons, which is somewhat of an annoyance.
Beyond that, the board is beautiful and a nice centerpiece for the game.
Wood Bits: There are 15 small wooden cubes, 2 pawns, 10 house-shaped temples, and 8 large wooden-cube cities in each of the five player colors (red, blue, green, yellow, and black). These are all good quality wood, but the temple and city pieces weren't particularly good choices for what they represent. Personally the house-like temples make me think "city" while the cities are differentiated from the smaller resource cubes only by dots on one face, and thus end up too similar looking (and in no way say "city" to me). I wish that Phalanx had gone to the extra trouble to get more unique & appropriate wood pieces for these latter two bits as it would have made the game that much easier and more intuitive to play.
Player Boards: Each player gets a medium-weight full-color board which has spaces for the four actions he can bid on: first player, army, temple, or city. It uses intuitive icons for all of these, and as with all the other components in this game, it looks very nice.
Screens: Small wooden screens intended to hide each player's board while he's blind bidding. Unfortunately they're too short to really do a good job of that, and seeing other peoples' boards was a problem in both games I played. In our second game a few players took to using them upside down, which helped to cover the player boards more. It's also a shame that these screens don't have basic information on them (mainly, the VP values of the various things you can do), as first-time players are constantly referencing this.
Player Aid Card: A nice addition, this one-page summary card, printed on thick card stock, lists all the most important rules for the game, and also all the scoring.
Rules Book: An 8-page full-color rulebook, attractively printed in full-color and featuring a few examples. I had a lot of problem with this rulebook, as have other players. It's organized well enough, but the text just doesn't clarify the rules in a number of places. I ended up writing a FAQ before my first game, jsut so that I had a set of decisions for how to play the game where the rules weren't clear. In my first version of the FAQ I got 4 out of 5 of my guesses right. (The link has all 5 right and is suggested before you try and play this game.) These were hard rules to follow, and the rules for turn order in particular were some of the worst I've read.
Overall, Alexander the Great is a beautiful game. Absolutely gorgeous. The map, the cards, and everything else, has been produced well, with a great graphical design sense. A few minor issues serve to impact that beauty, however, including the overcrowded board and the semi-appropriate wood bits, while the rules making things very hard for first time players are a big deal. On the whole I've still given the game a high "4" out of "5" for Style. It would have been a "5" with just a bit more care.
The Gameplay
The object of Alexander the Great is to score point by building temples and cities and oppressing the population in the wake of Alexander's mighty army.
Setup: The board is laid out and each player is given a set of resource cubes, markers, cities, and temples, as well as a player's board and a screen to (somewhat) cover it.
Order of Play: The game is played over six campaigns, each of which lasts 1-3 rounds. Each round consists of the following actions:
- Distribute Resources
- Reveal & Determine Turn Order
- Move & Build
- Score
Distribute Resources: Each round starts off with a blind bid. A player takes his 15 resource markers and then secretly distributes them between four spaces: first player, army, temple, and city.
(If a campaign lasts more than one round, in later turns, a player will have less resources to distribute--just those that were left on temple and city at the end of the previous round--and may only put those resources into temple or city. First Player and army size are only determined once per campaign.)
Reveal & Determine Turn Order: Now each player reveals their choices.
In the first round of a campaign only player order is determined. The player who bid the most resources into that box gets to go in whichever player order space that he wants. (He should choose last.) The other players all go from first to last in decreasing order of Victory Points (e.g., the player with the most VPs goes first); the number of resources they spent are irrelevent. Any resources that anyone spent on turn order are now discarded until the next campaign.
Move & Build: Players now take their turns in the turn order. Each player takes the resources that he spent on armies and moves them onto the board. Each cube may be moved up to three spaces, but moving between provinces costs resources which may be spent from the Cities or the Temples space as the player desires.
(The board is somewhat complex, with arrows showing legal movements between spaces, and some of those arrows marked with a cost of "1", "2", "3", or even "4" resources. You only pay the cost once for each group of cubes you move at the same time. The arrow costs are generally unidirectionall; for example, it costs 2 to move from Memphis to Lybia, but just 1 to move from Lybia to Memphis. It's further worth noting that by choosing to pay from Temples or from Cities you can help control the rseults of your blind bid after you've seen what everyone else has done.)
After you've moved your armies, you may then choose to build Cities or Temples, or at least try to, because you don't know if you succeed until Scoring. You have to have armies in a space to build there, and the space must have the appropriate symbol (a city or a temple). In addition, cities are limited to one per province, and so if you're in the second or third round of a campaign, and someone's already built a city in that space, you can't.
(In later rounds of a campaign, you can just keep moving your pieces from where they landed on the previous turn; they don't reenter.)
Score: After everyone has taken their actions, each province in a region is now scored.
If a player has the most cubes in a province he earns 2 points (with ties being unfriendly, and no one getting the points.)
Building a temple earns 3 points and a city earns 5. A player does this automatically if he was the only person to attend that building in the province. Otherwise, all the players who tried compare their resource pools. Whoever has the most cubes in his city resource space gets to build a city in a contested space, and whoever has the most cubes in his temple resource space gets to build a temple in a contested space (with ties again being unfriendly, and preventing everyone from building). Each province is examined one at a time, and thus whether a player spends resources in an early province may then lose a contest in a later province as a result.
Usually a player pays 1 cube to build a temple or 2 to build a city, out of the appropriate resource space. However, if he had to compete he instead pays the number of cubes that the next highest player has in that space plus one. Which can be a lot.
Ending a Campaign: A campaign ends when any one player moves cubes into the province in the region marked with the "end of campaign" symbol. The current round is finished & the next round will take place in the next region, forming a new campaign.
Ending the Game: The game ends after the sixth campaign. Now some additional points are scored: +5 to the player with the most temples in each region; + 5 to the player with the most cities in each region; +10 to the player with the most cities on the board; and +15 to the player with the most temples on the board. Ties are again unfriendly. The player with the most points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Alexander the Great is a pretty unique blind-bidding, resource-allocation, and majority-control game.
The blind-bidding is interesting because it goes beyond the simple rock-scissors-paper choice that you see in most blind-bidding games. You're instead choosing the general parameters of how you're going to use resources over the next round; I wouldn't mind seeing more games built on this premise. In addition, thanks to the way that movement works you can adjust parts of your blind bid after seeing what other players have done, which is a nice compromise. I'm not really aware of other blind-bidding games which allow this much complexity or control.
The resource-allocation is very simple, with it mainly being competition between different players, but it's given sufficient depth by the blind-bidding system.
Finally, the majority-control system is fairly simple; you get points from controlling various provinces. However, it's wrong to generally call this game a majority-control game, because that's just one part of the scoring (and not the largest). Players looking solely for majority control might be disappointed. One rare element in this majority-control mechanism is the ability to purposefully move pieces between adjacent spaces, something that you don't see in El Grande, Mammoth Hunters, and so many others. I like it, and it's another game design element that I'd like to see used more often.
If I haven't listed that many other games in this section on relationships, that's because Alexander the Great is new and innovative in many ways.
The Game Design
Let me start off by saying that Alexander the Great is one of my favorite "serious" games of the year. It hasn't been a great year, mind you, but this one is up there with the other deep games like Louis XIV and In the Shadow of the Emperor.
Alexander's greatest strength is in its originality. I don't have any other games quite like this one, and that immediately increases the enjoyment I get from the play. It's also a clever game, that allows from multiple levels of tactical decisions. You can build strong armies to gain majority-control points, you can build temples, you can build cities, you can try and stall during a campaign, or you can try and push it toward its end. I also think this game provides excellent use of the blinding bidding mechanism for the reasons I note above, and the combination of blind bidding with tactical decisions is much of what makes the game original. Finally, the game does offer some long-term strategy as you amass either cities or temples and try and keep building toward that, but on the other hand there is an opportunity to make a switch between the two if you catch it early enough.
On the downside, Alexander feels a lot like an indie game which didn't receive enough outside development. It has sharp edges & awkward rules, like the first-turn player order method and the fact that province majority scoring happens at the end of the game. I also have some concerns over strategies degenerating, particularly when a player stacks all of his resources in either city or temple, then keeps forcing the end of the campaign; there are ways to avoid this--as in most blind bidding games if someone matches you, you're in trouble--but they generally require another player to take it in the teeth.
I'm also comment that though this game works up to 5 players, it's one where I suspect the sweet spot is a little lower, because more players increases the chaos. I'd guess 4 or 3 is the best for the game, and I'm leaning toward the former. (I've played the game with both 4 and 5, and felt like it was a stronger game with 4.)
On the whole Alexander the Great is a game that I like quite a bit, and if I'm annoyed over the fact that the game seems underdeveloped it's because i think that may have kept a very good game from becoming a great game. Nonetheless, Alexander earns a high "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Alexander the Great is an interesting combination of blind bidding, tactics, resource allocation, and majority control. It plays like just about nothing else in my collection, and I think it'll probably end up being one of the top dozen or so gamer's games of the year. Some additional development might have earned it the top spot for the year, but as is I think it's worth a look by serious gamers; even those who don't usually enjoy blind bidding might want to take a look, as it has some methods for you to effectively change your bid in minor ways once it's been made, allowing some additional control.
Review Summary