A LOT of diecut cardboard. Splotter, specifically the twisted folks Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga who gave us the micromanagement classic Roads and Boats, has created a European-style game with as many counters as a classic SPI monster wargame. Actual play leaves the table practically drenched in counters ranging from tiny half-inch
counters to Tetris-like building shapes.
Clearly, the folks at Splotter are completely barking mad.The art design of the game is your first clear indication that you are dealing with something unusual. The plain blue box has no artwork and is styled to resemble an archaelogical archival box with some authorization stamps, and some scrawled dates and approval signature. The archival theme is carried over into the components which are...brown. Everything has a faded crumpled and foxed paper look. The buildings are brown with simple fonts, the hextile maps are brown backgrounds with some murky green and blues. The player sheets are tan (light brown), and most of the counters are varying shades of browns and muted colors save for the pollution counters which are maroon (which is of course a brownish red.)
With all of these pieces, you would expect to see a massive rulebook. What we have here is a fairly petite 8 page A4 booklet (also brown). The base rules are actually amazingly simple. Each player has a city represented by a 7x7 grid. The first phase of each turn has you buy new Tetris buildings in your city simultaneously. Each building gets you a special power or tweak, with the two most important ones being houses (which give you men) and cart shops (which let you send these men outside the city). While you are buying buildings, you also allocate men to various buildings to be able to use that building's special effect during the turn.
Then you send your guys out to the outside to "do stuff." You can basically "do stuff" on any hex within two hexes of your city. The kinds of stuff you can do pretty much boils down to collect resources, build inns, and build new cities.
Collecting resources is the heart of the game. You send your guy on cart shop out into the world with whatever resource is required to build his farm, mine, pier, fishing fleet. The hex the guy is sent to receives a pollution marker and a resource marker. Each adjacent hex of the same terrain type receives the same pollution and resource markers.
Every turn from then on, you collect one resource marker. When the last resource marker is picked up, the guy comes home. The pollution stays. And you cannot collect new resources where there is pollution. This is why there are all of the counters, as your starting city is contained within a massive cloud of polluted hexes. Each city you have also forces you to plop down three more pollution each turn.
That's where inns and cities come in. Inns expand the area in which you can put down farms and such, cities not only expand your range, but also give you another grid in
which to put more buildings.There is one more nasty aspect to the game, which the designers strongly recommend avoiding for beginners. There is a famine level which grows every round. Players who do not have enough food to meet the famine level must add graveyards to their cities (which take up space).
The tactical part of the game comes from the buildings. Buildings can allow you to harvest more, clean up pollution, start farms without needing a resource, increase your range to three hexes, build inns, and you must build a cathedral.
When you build your cathedral, you must declare it to your choice of saints. The saint chosen determines what special power you get as well as your victory condition. Victory conditions include things such as: build 20 houses, build one of each building, or surround another player with your area of control.
Antiquity is a polarizing game. It tends to produce fairly strong likes and dislikes among my fellow gamers. The game has a quirky nature: it takes 3-4 hours to play, and does not have a lot of interaction. (The interaction comes mostly from crowding out folks in the later game as you are racing to build inns away from your polluted core.) You have to be thinking a couple of turns ahead in your production, and getting used to the building powers takes 3 or 4 games.
