AKROPOLIS ATHENA - Unboxing & Overview

Description provided by Board Game Gumbo (Board Game Gumbo) on YouTube:

AKROPOLIS is one of my wife's favorite games of all time, probably her favorite abstract game. It's the one non-card game that she has consistently played solo over the years. But after two years of playing it, I could see that even she needed a little bit of fresh air in the game. And so, she was very excited that I brought home a copy of AKROPOLIS ATHENA, the expansion from the same design team courtesy of our friends at GIGAMIC. AKROPOLIS ATHENA is my favorite kind of expansion. It's small, takes just a minute to teach, and doesn't add a lot of bloat to the game. Here's the low down: Players are trying to honor the goddess Athena by building a beautiful, four part statue. Building it is optional, but boy does it give you some cool bonuses. To set up the expansion, four random achievement cards are chosen from a stack of about 16 cards. Then below each of the four cards four random mini tiles are assigned, as well as one of the four unique statue parts (with copies of the statue parts for as many players as you have). That's the entirety of the set up. And the rest of the game is played just like the original game, except that if at the end of any turn, a player's tableau matches one of the Athena statue cards, then they get that statue piece PLUS they get one of the mini-tiles. The mini-tiles are all juicy. Some are just extra tiles of the five main colors. Others add more scoring stars. And finally, some of these are multi-colored tiles. These mini-tiles are just one hex, and they can be placed ANYWHERE (except on top of another mini-hex), meaning you can really open up some scoring multipliers. There is one more bonus -- any player that builds the Athena statue in all four parts before the end of the game changes the scoring multiplier for the quarry stones from one point to five points each. That's a huge jump, and definitely a nice bump for the stones. All in all, there's just no way I will play AKROPOLIS without throwing in the ATHENA expansion. It doesn't change the gameplay very much, but it really does punch up the scoring and strategy. Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler! -- BJ from Board Game Gumbo ** A complimentary copy of the expansion was provided by the publisher. We purchased the base game at retail price from our FLGS, Anubis Game & Hobby. **