Tuesday 13th September - Capitol

Capitol-2-WEB
Originally uploaded by coljen.

This week's game was Capitol by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum. Released by Schmidt Spiele in 2001. The theme is building houses in Rome, and the board depicts the City of Rome and the available spaces to build. The game is played in 4 phases, construction, improvement, scoring and end.
Construction
Most of the action takes place in this phase, player perform actions with their hand of roof, permit and floor cards. Buildings are constructed off of the board. The floor cards let you take 2 floor blocks from the supply, the roof card lets you place one of your roofs on a completed building and the permit card allows you to place a building on an area on the board corresponding to the colour on the card. When all players have passed playing cards you proceed to improvement.
Improvement
In this phase there are 3 auctions, 2 for fountains and 1 for either an amphitheature (rounds 1-2) or a temple (rounds 3-4). Fountains can be placed on an area on the board and increase the scoring by 1pt. The amphitheatre allows the first and second players in each area to draw extra cards in the end phase. The temple scores the area in which it is placed double points. You use the numbers on your cards to bid with the winner placing his on the discards.
Scoring
Each area is then scored, the player with most floors gets 2pt + 1pt for each fountain. The second gets just points for the fountains, if any.
End Phase
Each player, starting with the start player then draws 6 cards each to replenish their hand.

Garry hadn't played before but Steve and I had. You have to use your roofs carefully keeping an eye on which shape, round or pitched, the areas are using. It's an easy game to pick up and it plays very smoothly. Deciding which cards to draw can be interesting as you don't want to leave high numbers for the next player if you can help it. It plays in just over an hour and I find it a solid design with some interesting choices to make. In the end the scores where quite spread out as you can see.

Final Scores
Steve 57, Garry 47, Colin 40