Peloponnes - 8 June 2011

After a quick show-and-tell of my purchases from Sunday's Expo, we got stuck into the most promising of the new games - Peloponnes.  This is a light civilisation game with many mechanisms common from other games but with some interesting new features.  For example, players bid for Land or Building tiles but when outbid, they have to move their bid to another tile rather than increase their bid.  It's a resource management game too with food to feed your population, wood and stone for your buildings, and luxury goods to act as wild cards.

The rules were generally good and clear but we came unstuck right at the end as we were surprised to then find that the rules say there is no income in the eighth and final round - so the call on resources is very high and most of us had significant population shrinkage right at the end.  Victory points are decided by taking the lower of your population (x3) or your prestige (plus money divided by 3).  With Orhan down to 2 population, Kieron on 3, and Andy, David and James all on 4 (so 12 points) - it was the David's higher prestige of 26 that gave him first place, with Andy a close second.

However, I've now scanned the BGG forum and found a posting where the designer himself confirms that players do indeed collect income in the final round before resolving the last disasters and feeding their population for the final time.

This would definitely have affected the final scores but I'm not sure exactly how but before the last round, it looked like Andy and Orhan were ahead.  Anyway, with the current score line, at least Kieron broke his Maltese run of finishing last in every game last week.

When I bought this game (for the princely sum of £9!) I got an expansion that will allow us to play with 6 players (as well as a box signed by the designer!).  I have now also downloaded another couple of expansions from BGG that will give even more variety.

General feeling (which I think will be strengthened now we've resolved the final round income in a way that felt instinctively right to us, even though the printed rules were wrong...) was this was a good game that we should play again soon.  Now we know the rules, I think we'd fit two games into one evening session.