Building a Greek City with Strategic Layers

Have you played Akropolis? We bought it at SPIEL22 but have never posted about it. 🤔 It is a chill tile-laying game - while it doesn’t reinvent the formula, it does have its own spin on scoring and spatial placement, which makes it very much enjoyable! 😊 But how do you build your multi-layered greek city?

Well it’s quite simple! 🧐 Each turn you take a tile and place into your city, either expanding the lower level, or placing it on top of other tiles. As the tiles in the display run out, you will add more tiles to it and pass the first-player marker. Also, you might have to spend stone cubes to pick tiles, depending on where they are in the display. ☝️

The fun and complexity of the game comes from the type of districts you can add to your city:
🏠 The blue houses need to be adjacent to each other, as you will only score your biggest contiguous block.
💰 The yellow markets are the opposite of houses. Merchants don’t like competition so you have to place them away from each other. Touching markets are all worth 0 points.
🏛️ Purple temples only score if they are completely surrounded.
⚔️ Red garrisons only score if they are at the edge of your city.
🪨 Grey quarries give stone, but only if you cover them with other tiles.
🌳 Finally, green gardens are just freebies, they simply score wherever they are.

The other type of things you build are the plazas, which have the same colors as the districts, and act as multipliers at the end of the game.

Now the aspect of building on higher levels comes into the picture: whatever you cover up is gone, however the districts will be worth more points too! 😮 Also covering up the gray quarries is the only way to get stone, which is important so you don’t just blindly pick tiles. It’s never easy deciding what to cover up and lose forever, but building higher is essential! Drafting too many districts or plazas without their counterparts is a recipe for disaster, so be wise and watch your opponent's city too!

All in all, we like this game, even if it’s not the biggest gaming innovation. It is just a fun and quick filler for tired afternoons, and it also looks delightful. Did I mention I love hexes too? 😅