Tuesday July 18th - Kreta/Packeis am Pol

Kreta
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Tonight we are all ready to give Kreta its first outing at Billygames. This 2005 game by Stefan Dorra is basically an influence game loosely themed around the island of Crete. This is a brief description from the publisher:

From the publisher, Goldsieber:

Settle the most important Cretan provinces with your followers. Build booming cities and increase your influence by building massive towers. Locate your fleet carefully but also try to harvest as many grapes and olives as possible. Only he who best places his Admiral, King, Farmers and Castellan will end up winning the race for power and prestige!

This is a bit of an extravagent claim as in reality it a tight, well designed game but not a blockbuster. Steve quickly ran through the rules and we were up and running. Each player has a hand of cards, each players cards are the same, the admiral, the builder, the abbot, the farmer a scoring card, the king, the felder and the baumeister. In turn each player plays a card and initiates the appropriate action. Like play a villager , the abbot, a fort or village or place one of your ships in a harbour.
There is a deck of cards representing the intersections between the provinces, at the beginning you turn the top two face up, whenever a player plays his scoring card you score the first one. That player then turns over the next card and has the option to accept it or put it on the bottom of the deck and turn another one over which he must accept. Each province that borders the intersection is scored, the player with the most influence scores the number of hexes in that province in VPs, second, half rounded down.
You score eleven intersections and that is it.... not quite, there is quite a lot decision making involved making Kreta quite an absorbing game, we all liked it, even if Steve wanted to start again after 10 minutes because he had done it all wrong to far. This didn't reflect in the final scores however, all the way through the game Garry and Steve were vieing for the lead with me in third and Richard bringing up the rear. I was gradually getting closer to the front two and on the final scoring managed to overhaul Garry and tie with Steve for first place. Definitely want to play that again!!

Final Scores
Steve 53, Colin 53, Garry 52, Richard 47