Amon Ra

MeMestremutenstar5,0

Rating: 3/5 Production value: 2/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1

EvEvanstar4,6

Each round you flip a number of region cards equal to the number of players. Then players bid on the regions with the high bidder taking control of it with their claim marker. Then, players can buy farmers to put into the region, special action cards, and bricks that form pyramids. Then players secretly select some amount of money to throw away, the sum of which determines how much the farmers will produce that round in new money for their owners. This process gets tricky, as players not invested in farms can put a negative value card in the mix which leeches money from the total and gives it to the player. You play this way for a few rounds, and then once the board is full, you do a scoring awarding points to players for pyramids, majorities on either side of the nile river, and for holding spaces with printed temples. Then you do a big reset leaving only the point scoring temples on the board, and begin the bidding process again. The valuation process round to round is wild. Like most good games of this nature, players are valuing things differently from each other depending on their strategy going in. Ultimately plays don't vary much from one another. Either you are doing farms or going for raw income spots and bidding accordingly. Saving money from round 1 to try and win built up spaces in round 2. It's solid for a few plays, but I'm not finding the player interaction nor the game systems enough to be interesting enough for this to have much staying power.

anandyctedstar8,8

4-5 players. Classic Knizia but in a more complete/complex package than other simple auction games. One of his best, surely his best at 5 players and, at this weight, one of the best 5-player game of all time