HuntGamesAlhambra

From MasonicGenealogy
Revision as of 13:06, 8 October 2020 by Hotc1733 (Talk | contribs)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

ALHAMBRA

pic174385.jpg

BGG Link


Designer: Dirk Henn
Our Rating: 8

DESCRIPTION

Tile laying games are as old as dominoes, but really took off after the publication of Carcassonne in 2000. Alhambra is a riff on the traditional theme, with players building a tableau of tiles to form their own palace. Interaction takes place before the tile is acquired, buying it from a central market; tiles are drawn and placed in one of four slots, corresponding to four different currencies. To acquire a tile requires the expenditure of the appropriate currency, of at least the amount shown on the tile.

pic1666337.jpg

On a player turn, you can either acquire currency from the face up cards - any one card, or any combination adding up to 5 or less – or pay currency from hand to buy a tile. The best outcome is to pay the exact cost of a tile, because then you get another action. Tiles are only refreshed at the end of the turn, so the maximum number of actions available is 5: buy 4 tiles, take one more action (acquire currency, or do a Reserve action; tiles that are acquired can go into Reserve or come out of Reserve, allowing some flexibility in placement).

Once all tiles are acquired, they can be added to the tableau (without rotating, it should be noted). Some (most) tiles have one or more walls, and the cardinal rule is that it must be possible to trace a route from the start tile to the newly-placed location. Walls can be placed next to walls, and non-walls next to non-walls - ideally your connected walls are on the outside of the palace, and are long and extensive; at each scoring phase, in addition to majority in tile types, players receive one point per wall section in their longest string of connected walls. Generally, the lower the tile value, the more walls on the tile.

So it's a puzzle and a resource challenge, and that makes for a good combination. The game won SdJ in 2003, and was immediately impossible to find (but we'd bought it in Germany that year, so yay us.)

Scoring occurs three times: twice when scoring cards come up, and a third time when tiles run out. The scoring cards appear at regular intervals but randomly, another now-standard scoring convention.

Alhambra shines with three or four, doesn't really work with two, and is unplayably chaotic at five or six (just no way to plan for anything).

EXPANSIONS

Boy howdy, there are a crapload of them. They were released in smaller boxes, groups of four additions, starting as soon as the game had won Spiel des Jahres. Most make the game unnecessarily complicated. We have them all, including the Magical Buildings, and use almost none of them.

The boxes are:

  1. The Vizier's Favor
  2. The City Gates
  3. The Thief's Turn This one has the only expansion we use regularly: Change (See picture below).
  4. The Treasure Chamber
  5. Power of the Sultan
  6. The Falconers

pic98665.jpg

There is also a six-tile expansion called The Magical Buildings, which are the only tiles that can actually be rotated. We usually use these too.

This game is a good filler, not especially heavy, with most of the expansion materials completely superfluous.


Games Top