Akropolis Boardgame

Akropolis is a tile laying game from designer Jules Messaud with art by Pauline Detraz published by Gigamic.

This two to four player game tasks you with building the best city in the heart of the Mediterranean in Ancient Greece. You need to build housing, temples, markets, gardens and barracks all whilst collecting and spending the resource of stone. The game lasts 25 minutes and is suitable for ages 8 upwards.

The game uses mechanisms such as drafting, city building, and set collection and it includes 61 City Tiles, 4 Starting Tiles, 4 Player Aids, 1 Scorepad, 1 Start Player Marker and 40 Stone Cubes.

On the reverse of the city tiles it says how many players each tile is for so in a 2 player game you only need to take the tiles out of the box with a 2 on the reverse.

At the start of the game all players are given a starting tile and then 11 equal piles of city tiles are created face down (using 3 tiles per stack for a 2 player game, 4 tiles for a 3 player game, and 5 tiles for a 4 player game) in the middle of the table. The first player is given 1 stone, the second player is given 2, third player is given 3 and finally the fourth player is given 4. The remaining tiles not stacked are placed in a line face up and then play can commence.

The first tile does not cost anything to draft, however each tile after the first one will cost the player 1 stone cube which is paid to the bank. A player chooses a tile and adds it to their city. To add a tile to your city on the ground level it must border your existing city tiles along at least one edge. To build on a higher level it must be placed on top of three hexes (not over an empty space) and must cover at least 2 different tiles.

When you cover quarries (white spaces) you gain a stone for each hex. On some of the tiles you will find Plazas which are the multipliers used for scoring. You will also find houses (blue) which score for your largest group of connected houses. Markets (yellow) which only score if not next to other markets. Barracks (red) which only score if at the cities edge. Temples (purple) which only score if surrounded. Gardens (green) do not have any requirements for scoring.

Each round the players will be able to draft one city tile (except the starting player who gets to draft twice as they go first and last) and then the start player will move clockwise to the next player. At the start of each round one of the stacks of city tiles are turned over and placed alongside the previously unclaimed tile. The game continues like this until there are no more replacement stacks available.

To calculate each score you take the number of multipliers for each area (number of stars) and multiply that by the districts level. For example if you had 4 stars for markets and two separated markets one of which was on the ground level and the other was on the third level you would score (4x1 & 4x3) 16 points. At the end of the game you calculate everyone’s score using the scorepad and the player with the most points wins. Stones are used for tiebreaks and also provide 1 point per stone left in your supply at the end of the game.

The game includes variants for using all of the tiles for a 2 or 3 player game as well as an additional scoring variant which increases the difficulty for more experienced gamers.