Egizia

Plays very well with four players.

Worker placement game where you place your ships in a variety of locations (cards, which change each round, workers, building sites) over the course of 5 rounds of play.

The theme is ancient Egypt and the mechanic is worker placement, and it has a feeding of workers phase, as well as a resource maintenance phase (stone), so it doesn't sound like anything different at first glance. What saves this game is a new twist, which is that once you place further down the river, you can't go back upstream- this has alot more impact on gameplay than you would think. Also, the fact that the game plays smoothly and quickly helps alot. Seems to scale well from 2-4 players.

Scoring is primarily accomplished through building a variety of different monuments (for which you need workers and stone), and also through acquiring Sphinx cards, which are end-of-the game condition points.

A very solid and possibly overlooked game.

Another one of those set collection Euros where you have to go down the one way road and stop on stuff to pick it up.

Love the tension of the worker placement. Sometimes that perfect card action comes out way down the river, but at the cost of having to give up all the actions the come before it. The cards are pretty swingy though, and makes the game a bit too focused on drawing good end game scoring cards.

2 plays / 3, 4 players

LIKE: Good worker placement with some tense decisions. The cards for each round are powerful and make interesting decisions. One-way worker placement is a great mechanism. The farm-drought mechanism is a nice interactive "take-that" component.

DISLIKE: Hidden goal cards seem overpowered since players can hold many of them, and some seem unbalanced. Being stone-starved seems to be a game-ender. Lots of little rules that are easily forgotten.

OVERALL: I really enjoyed my play of this. Plenty of strategy and interesting ideas that still feels fresh. It's very similar to the game "Steam Time", but I like the farm/drought interaction in this for a slight edge.