About Ierusalem

In our unboxing reel we wrote a bit about the theme of Ierusalem: Anno Domini - you play as a group of followers of Jesus of Nazareth, coming to attend the passover seder - which will be later known as the Last Supper. Now let’s see how the game works! 🙃

Action selection is done by playing cards. Everyone has a deck of 10 cards - You always have 5 in hand. You can buy special “Mahane” and “33 AD” cards during the game, but these are one-use, so there is no deck-building. On your turn you have to play a card into one of 3 slots of your player board. Order of card placement is important, as you are trying to complete sets of icons so you can meet Apostles and add them to the Last Supper table, scoring the set and activating special Apostle actions.

Upon card placement you first do the Location action of the card which is shown in its upper left corner, then you may do the actions shown on the bottom.
You can e.g.:
🔸 Gather stone, bread or fish from the desert, mountain and lake (The more meeples you have on the location, the more resources you get.)
🔸 Send out meeple from your warehouse to those location using the temple.
🔸 Trade resources and money in the market.
🔸 Send meeple from the locations to the Last Supper area - depending on which grid space you go to, pay resources and get any bonus you cover up. You basically want to sit as close as possible to the Apostles and Jesus to earn more points at the end, but spaces on the far end cost less and may give bonuses. You have limited possibilities to change seats later.
🔸 Give a favor tile to one of your opponents, and receive a powerful “33 AD” card in return. Your opponent receives the benefit on the tile.

💬 With 2p, the whole Favor mechanic is removed, plus the meeple placement part has less going on. To counteract this, you use the 2 other colors as “friendly followers”. Some actions allow you to move or place them to score points in a “candy crush way”. It sounds fun, but in the end it’s a bit dull. The player interaction is almost gone, so it feels like playing a different game. All in all, the 2p game doesn’t seem to work as good, so I’d say this game is probably best played at 3 or 4.