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The King of Babylon wants to offer a marvelous present to his wife, Queen Amytis: The most beautiful city ever created. He asks two of the best Architects in the world to design the city, and only the very best one will be built. It's now up to you to create the best design.
Les Architectes d'Amytis ("Architects of Amytis") is a Tile placement game, containing some worker placement and even some "Tic Tac Toe" mechanisms.
During your turn, you'll have to select a tile among the available ones on the main board, and place one of your Architect Pawn on the corresponding pile.
Then, you'll place the tile on your board wherever you want (on a free spot, or covering another tile to make your city grow higher). Each tile is colored (4 colors) and represents a building (6 different types). Each building type will score directly when you place the tile. And the colors will allow you to reproduce some of the King's projects (a colored pattern inside your city) that will grant you points at the end of the game.
Furthermore, while placing your architects on the main board, if you manage to create a line, row or diagonal of 3, you'll be granted a King's favor: another type of score,triggered at the end of the game.
Buildings all have 2 types of scoring, so you can play different kind of games one after the other ;)
Which strategy will you choose to create the most marvelous city of the World? :)
—description from the publisher
- Elevated familiar concept (tic-tac-toe)
- Escalating tension
- Distilled and fun focus
- Easy to pick up with elevated strategy
- Civilization building
- knots and crosses
- tic-tac-toe
- Arboritum
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- card drafting — Project cards add a layer, requiring specific configurations of building tiles to score.
- Pattern Building — Creating lines of three meeples of the same color (diagonal, vertical, horizontal) allows placing project markers.
- set collection — Scoring based on different tile types (gardens, forts, sentinels, location cards, banners) and their placement.
- Stacking — Building tiles can be placed on top of other tiles, creating stacks.
- tile drafting — Players draft tiles from a 3x3 grid.
- worker placement — Placing meeples on tiles blocks them for the opponent.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Hi, I'm Danny. I'm an avid modern board gamer from Australia. Love sharing my passion for this hobby with you, my friends, and my family.
- If you've ever played a game called Arboritum, which has ways that you line up trees in ascending order in a grid, this game kind of has that very tense, tight feeling to it, which I really, really enjoyed.
- So, what did you think of those simple yet strategic two-player games?
- I hope your next board game experience is an amazing one, and I can't wait to share this entire library of games behind me with you in the future.
References (from this video)
- Interesting combination of tic-tac-toe-like mechanics with tile placement and pattern building
- Potential for strategic depth with more plays
- Fast to teach
- Significant randomness in tile draws
- Frustration when you can't get needed tiles
- First impression was lukewarm
- pattern matching, tiling
- Patterns-based city-building with colored buildings
- abstract strategy
- Six Nymph
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- dice drafting — Draw tiles from a random pool; tile availability affects strategy.
- Pattern Building — Place colored building tiles to complete pattern goals on your board.
- pattern-building with tiles — Place colored building tiles to complete pattern goals on your board.
- tile drafting with randomness — Draw tiles from a random pool; tile availability affects strategy.
- tile stacking for alternate scoring — Stack tiles to meet alternative goals and gain points.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- My first impression was kind of lukewarm with this game.
- There is a lot of randomness in what tiles you are grabbing.
- I really enjoyed the synergies of mechanisms that are featured in this game.
- it's not something that immediately screams replayability to me.
- I did enjoy this game and would happily play it as someone else suggested it.
- Easy to learn and teach.
- This game has offered a lot of fun and replayability.
- The artwork is really nice.