I’ve always found it difficult to name my favourite game. On the one hand my taste has shifted in various directions over the last few years in the hobby, on the other hand I often have the urge to explore new games after I’ve played old favourites a number of times. So games that I adored at some point, although I still appreciate them, don’t speak to me in the same way they did before. Favourites come and go. All of this preamble is just an excuse to talk about a game I have played only four times, but that got better each time I played it: Antiquity from Splotter Spellen.
Antiquity is a civilization/tile-laying/ressource management game set in medieval Italy (just stay with me!) where you build your city on your own tableau and expand to the surrounding territory on a shared map, desperately fighting against pollution and famine. Things to love about Antiquity:
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Polyonimoe-tile-laying (before it got hip)! Your city board consists of a 7x7 grid which you fill with buildings of various shapes. The grid fills up very quickly which makes for agonizing decisions which buildings to place when and where, since each building gives you new abilities. The tile-placement aspect seems familiar today, but this game came out 10 years before Patchwork!
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Choose your own victory condition! As soon as you build the cathedral in one of your towns, you pledge yourself to one of five saints, four of which come with their own powerful ability and a victory condition that you now have to work towards. What about the fifth saint then, you might wonder, does she also give you a special power? One? How about you get all the abilities of the other four saints? The catch is that Santa Maria expects you to fulfill two victory conditions instead of just one to win the game. This saint gives you loads of flexibilty in an excessively tight game, but Antiquity is a race to complete your objective and having to fulfill two of those is incredibly worrisome.
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Beautiful aesthetics! Well this might be divisive, but I really love the old map look of the shared board, the colorful icons on the ressources and the lavish playerboards (although it would be great if they were cardboard instead of paper).
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Lots of variablity based solely on the map setup! When you start a game the only factor that informs your strategy is the randomized composition of the map and where on it you start. If you have access to a lot of rivers you might play a very different game than when you have forests and mountains all around you. I love how much variability you get without complicating the game with variable player powers or stuff like that.
There are a couple of things that people might find off-putting. Foremost, Antiquity is known to be quite fiddly. There are lots of little bits to place on and remove from the board all the time. I think the first two editions of Antiquity used cardboard tokens instead of translucent plastic chips as pollution markers which made the board even harder to read. I don’t mind the fiddliness, but recognize that it might annoy some people.
The other thing about this game is that it is mean. And I don’t mean in the sense of player interaction (although there is that too!), it’s just that the game absolutely hates you. If you don’t plan right you might get stuck in a sea of pollution with no more legal moves available to you, which means you are out of the game. Or you could just get overwhelmed with famine which fills your city with graves. However, in true Splotter fashion if you get wrecked it’s no one’s but your own fault. There are no random event decks or stuff like that, you can always see the escalation on the horizon and are able to prepare for it. So I guess this is something that is common to a lot of Splotter games.
This game is most certainly not for everybody, but if this sound appealing, by all means give it a shot! (For example, right here: Does anyone want to play Antiquity?)