An evening with Friendless and Scrabblette

I went over to Friendless and Scrabblette's place this evening to play Antike with them. Antike is a strategy board game about evolution and competition among ancient civilisations. Players can create cities, build temples, sail the seas, and discover new principles of science and technology. Your legions and galleys create new settlements and defend their people against attacks from their enemies. Players choose from Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Persians, Arabs, Egyptians, and Babylonians.

The board at the end of the game

Every nation tries to win kings, scholars, generals, citizens, and navigators for themselves. The nation that acquires a specified number (depending on the number of players) of ancient personalities first wins the game.

As we played with three players the winning target was 10 points. Friendless played the Arabs (yellow), Scrabblette played the Persians (blue) and I played the Greeks (green). This was the second play of the game for Friendless but the first time for Scrabblette and me. Friendless taught us the rules in about 15 minutes and then we started.

We each employed slightly different strategies, with Scrabblette going with a military strategy, Friendless with a gold strategy and with me I think somewhere in between. Friendless went on to win with 10 points, I came 2nd with 9 points and Scrabblette was 3rd with 7 points. The game took us about two hours to play. I found Antike to be an enjoyable game and one I'd want to play again.

And to top off a great evening Friendless very kindly and generously gave me his copy of Atlantis! This game (AKA Escape from Atlantis, AKA Survive!) is one that I've been wanting to get for many years and I know it will see a lot of play with my family.