Components: This is a beautiful looking game with some great artwork and fantastic pieces. Each civilisation has a set of distinct monument models which look great as do the models for the Great Wonders. Each player is represented by coloured minister figure which again are well made and look good. The pieces work well with the theme and the board is colourful as well as being well laid out. The cards are of good quality with some very nice artwork on them.
Gameplay: Essentially an area control game where you are competeting with the other players to build monuments for various civilisations or one of the 4 wonders. Monuments score for you at the end of each round but there value can be influenced each round by the players, Wonders score when you build them and also whenever you or anyone else builds a monument on that island. The aim is to gain prestige as you invite princes from the various civilisations and encourage them to build their monuments and wonders.
There are four islands on the board split into various districts worth a variety of points, these points are awarded to whoever has built a wonder on this island when someone builds a Monument on it. Monuments can be built when a player has amassed 3 of one civilisation on that district,, wonders are built when a player has 1 of each civilisation on the island. Players bring princes on the board by guest tokens drawn at random from a bag (3x No Players), these guests are placed near their corresponding island. Each player in turn order picks one guest and places one of their civilisation tokens on a district on that island this continues until everyone has done this 3 times. The guest tokens are then placed back in the bag.
Everyone is now dealt 5 cards, but depending on the current turn order they may have to discard some of these, which are used to move/add/remove princes from the islands or influence the value of the monuments.
When everyone has played their cards the monuments are scored according to their current value. This will then determine the new player order. If someone has got or exceeded 50 points at this stage the game ends.
Conclusions: This games looks great, plays extremely well and only lasts about an hour but there is a lot to do here with plenty of options as well as scope for strategy. Whilst there is an element of luck in this game (the cards and guest tokens) there is much you can do to mitigate this in the choices you make with what you have available. I really like this and it seems to play will with 2 as well as with more players showing how well balanced the game design is. This game will get a lot of table time as it plays really well and is quite a nice game to teach. I'm glad I have this in my collection and given the fun and quick play time this will get a lot of tabletime.
