Attika Board Game First Impressions

“Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on.”

~ Zeno of Citium

In ancient Greece—the cradle of European culture—Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes compete for dominance of the Greek peninsula and influence on the shrines. Each player oversees the building of his city-state. Temple, theatre and oracle, a harbour with ships, vineyard with vintner, and many more must find space on the Greek peninsula.

Attika is a very simple game to explain. You build buildings around a shared map and you win by building all of yours first or creating an unbroken path between two temples which sit in the corners of the map.

The board is made up of tiles each with a random selection of resources on them.

Your Turn

On your turn you have two options, draw 2 or build 3. When you draw you are taking tokens from the top of 4 stacks (and the stacks matter) and putting them on your player board.

These tiles represent buildings and they have a cost in resources to build onto the main board.

When you draw you place them on your player board. This has a tech tree of sorts showing which buildings connect to which other buildings, including their hierarchy.

Building

To build, you can either build a token already on your player board onto the game board or draw a token from a pile and build that if able. If you’re not able, it joins the rest of the ‘yet to be built’ buildings on your player board…

As I mentioned earlier you get to do this 3 times. Got it? (Easier to do than explain, too many boards :))

Buildings with an arrow can be built next to the building pointing to it for free if it’s already on the board. So if you have a Vinyard on the board, you can build the Ventner next to it without paying resources.

The cost of each building is a number of resources printed on the token taken from the space you put the building on and the 6 spaces around it. If you don’t have enough resources you can pay cards from your hand to make up the shortfall.

Cards

Cards have different resources and can be drawn instead of taking other actions

So, if you decide to build 3, you can build 1 draw 2 etc. But you draw last so you can’t draw hoping you get a resource you need to build that turn.

That’s it really, I mean there is a way to expand the map out but we didn’t get that far.

Attika Summary

I won but it was a hollow victory 🙂 3 of the players built on one side of the board. So all I did was just go up the other side of the board and connect 2 temples…

I enjoyed Attika but I need to play it again in a more competitive game. The mechanisms were great but I feel I missed out on the interaction of fighting for spaces and covering resources other players needed.

Another play is required.

Jesta ThaRogue