Do you like a little bit of chaos and unpredictability in your game play? Or do you prefer a game with scheming, subtlety and a little bit of turnabout? I may have a game for you that has a bit of both in it. Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East is a lite civilization building game that sees 1-6 players take on the role of an ancient power to see if they can build up their civilization and conquer the opposing great civilizations of the ancient Middle East. The game uses the same system as the first game in the series called Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea but does add some new tricks. First, the game now adds terrain. Second, the game not only has more playable civilizations (17 basic civilizations plus several additional civilizations in historical scenarios) but also gives some civilizations a second or even third choice for where to place their Homeland. The game is about competition to gain the most area in the ancient world, spreading your cultures influence and religion and reaping the economic benefits of your conquests. This competition comes in the form of gaining Victory Points through building cities and acquiring gods and sacking and looting cities through war and domination of the sea.
In this series of Action Points, we will take a look at the Game Board and its features, showing off the new Terrain and other features, dive into the Growth Phase, including how you acquire disks, deploy disks and the purpose of spreading your culture, explore the Card Phase and the different types of cards that appear in the deck, investigate the new addition of deities, how they are acquired and their special abilities, and finally an overview of the Competition Phase including Contested Areas and how to resolve them, how allies affect this outcome and the looting of vanquished cities.
Game Board
The Game Board is the canvas upon which the titanic struggle for regional supremacy is played out by the various ancient civilizations of the Middle East. The Game Board is a very large mounted mapboard measuring 34” x 22” and stretches from Turkey/Asia Minor in the northwest corner east toward Scythia in the extreme northeast corner to Persia in the southeast corner and Egypt in the southwest corner. The Game Board is very striking as it has different colored Terrain types, includes various ocean spaces and deserts and is centered around the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers found today in modern day Iraq and Iran.
The Game Board is a collection of spaces which are called Areas each with a unique name found in them. These spaces include both Land Areas and Sea Areas. The Land Areas are all 1 of 4 different types of Terrain including Fertile (green), Plains (light brown), Mountain (dark brown) and Desert (sandy or yellowish). The Terrain was a new edition to this entry in the series and brings with it some really interesting quandaries. The picture below shows an example of each of these types of Terrain. So what is the difference for these types of Terrain?
Terrain
The main difference for each of the Terrain types has to do with how many disks each Terrain will provide the player during the Growth Phase of the game. The number of disks players may obtain from their Presence in each Terrain type is as follows:
Sea: 1 disk for every 2 Sea Areas the player occupies.
Mountain (dark brown): 1 disk for every 2 Mountain Areas which each contain one of the player’s Settlements, which is defined as stacks of exactly 2 disks.
Plains (light brown): 1 disk for every Plains Area containing the player’s Settlements.
Fertile (green): 1 disk for every Fertile Area the player Controls OR which contains one of the player’s Settlements. This means that the Fertile Areas are almost always hotly contested as they are a good source of disk growth which leads to more power to spread out and win Competitions.
Desert (sandy or yellowish): Deserts do not generate disks but are counted for purposes of
Commerce, which is a topic we haven’t covered yet but is linked to trading with an adjacent civilization.
Strongholds
The only other important thing to point out about Terrain is the Stronghold benefit that is granted by Controlling a Mountain Area. At the beginning of the Growth Phase, there is an immediate step called the Stronghold Phase, which allows players that Control a Mountain Area, meaning they are the only one that have disks in the Area, to place a gray Stronghold Cube in the Area. If this Stronghold Cube is in an Area during a Competition, it can be discarded as a loss instead of the player losing one of their disks.
The rich River provinces beckon players to compete for them. This leads to more Competition, though a player may avoid that area and let other civilizations fight over those Areas. Mountains may prove good defensive cordons with the Stronghold rule but Mountains as do Deserts may generate the dreaded Barbarian invasions. While northern hordes and eastern invaders still come from the edges of the map, other major invasions come from Mountain or Desert provinces. This can alter a civilization’s perception of how secure, or not, the civilization might be in their chosen Home Areas. But, these choices have proven to be interesting and makes this volume in the series a bit different.
Borders
Land Areas are separated from one another by either dark brown Borders or thick meandering dark blue borders. The dark blue Borders represent rivers such as the Nile, Indus, Tigris and Euphrates. Sea Areas are identified by light blue Borders. A Land Area and a Sea Area can be separated by a
combination of the two. Areas are considered adjacent to one another if they share a common Border.
Islands
There are two Islands in the game including Rhodes and ALASHIYA (modern day Cyprus and the Home Area for the Sea Peoples civilization). Each is a Land Area surrounded by numerous Sea Areas and players can Settle these areas and even build up Cities. In its location, the Island of Rhodes is adjacent to the Icarian Sea, Egyptian Sea and Rhodian Sea. ALASHIYA is adjacent to the Rhodian Sea, Cilician Strait, Sinai Sea and Levantine Sea.
Home Areas
For the game’s 17 different playable civilizations, Home Areas are the 22 Areas which contain a unique illustration, or called an an indicia, associated with its matching civilization. Each of the Home Areas are also marked by having the Areas name appear in bolded black letters in all-caps.
Note that while most civilizations have a single Home Area, some civilizations have the choice of 2 or even 3 possible Home Areas, or which may vary with the scenario chosen due to the time period and that specific civilizations advancement to that period of history. As an example of this is the Egyptian civilization which has 2 different Home Areas including MEMPHIS and THEBES.
Victory Point Track
The board contains a Victory Point Track for players to keep track of their civilizations’ cumulative VP’s throughout the game. If a civilization’s score goes above 20, the player will place a white disk
underneath its VP marker with each of these white disks an additional +10 VP. A civilization’s VP total can never drop below 0.
The Game Board also has a General Records Track which is located above the Victory Point Track and is included for keeping track of the current Epoch, Turn and Player/Civilization Order. This space is not a playable area and is considered out-of-play. For certain Fate Cards in the game, its
border functions as a southern map edge for invasions.
The Game Board is very interesting as it is large and designed for a full 6-player game but can be made smaller for less players or for specific scenarios. Typically, when the play area is shrunk for a scenario, the players will be directed to place an unused civilization colored disk in the Areas that are considered out-of-play. The Game Board is made to make play fast and furious and take any guess work out of it with various symbols representing the civilization’s Home Areas, Borders between Areas and clear distinction in colors for the different Terrain types. The Game Board also is setup to keep civilizations on top of each other and always in a state of conflict.
In case you are interested, we also posted an interview with the designers Mark McLaughlin and Christopher Vorder Bruegge and developer Fred Schachter and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2019/12/16/interview-with-mark-mclaughlin-christopher-vorder-bruegge-designers-and-fred-schachter-developer-for-ancient-civilizations-of-the-middle-east-from-gmt-games/
If you are interested in Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East, you can order a copy for $90.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-836-ancient-civilizations-of-the-middle-east.aspx
In Action Point 2, we will dive into the Growth Phase which is the heart of the game, including a discussion about how players acquire disks, deploy those disks and explain the purpose of spreading your culture.
-Grant
The Players' Aid 