30th January - Mykerinos/Raub Ritter

Steve had wanted to play Heart of Africa again this week, but I think he realised that it was not one our favourite games and took pity on us and chose Mykerinos instead. Mykerinos is a game where the players are archaeologists working for patrons. The game consists of laying out a pattern of tiles to represent the desert, depicted on the tiles are pyramids, er lots of sand and symbols for the various patrons, they are divided into 6 squares per tile. Players start with a number of cubes in their colour and these are placed on the tiles, when everyone has passed the tiles are evaluated and the player with the majority of cubes has the choice of either of the two tiles (they are placed in pairs), or to place a cube in the museum. On the back of the tiles the patrons are depicted, each patron has a special power and as you collect them you can use their power once per round. They can do things like allow you to start an expedition with 2 cubes, place a cube in the museum, place a cube on a pyramid and so on.


The Desert

If you collect a set of the 5 different patrons at the end of the game this is worth 5VPs. When you place your cubes in the museum the various rooms have a number associated with a patron, at the end of the game you multiply that number with the number of that patron you have won. So cube management is basically the name of the game, you don't have enough cubes (8 in a 4 player game) to compete for every tile in the display, so you have to go for the ones you really need. For the patrons special ability and as a multiplier at the end of the game, also to get the set to a lessor degree I think as this is only worth 5VPs.


The Museum and Scoring Track

I really liked this game it plays smoothly in about an hour or just over, the components are good quality and gives you some interesting decisions to make.


The Patrons

Final Scores
Steve 49, Colin 44, Garry 42, Richard 36

Raub Ritter
As we had a bit of time left we had a game of Raub Ritter. I had only played this once before but after Steve had quickly revised the rules off we went. A tile laying game where you lay a tile in the landscape and play you knights onto the board to try and capture the Castles, Villages and Towns. You can place your knights on top of other players to capture them, and the player who's knight is on top at the end of the game gets the points. Again a nicely flowing game with some really hard decisions where sometimes you must play where you don't really want to.

Final Scores
Richard 32, Steve 24, Garry 24, Colin 22