Thebes is like spoilt milk. It smells bad, and you want other people to smell it so you can comiserate. Thebes is ranked 165th, which is comparable to the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby in turns of criminal significance. It should be closer to Risk at 6156th. If four people sit down at the table to play Thebes, each of them with widely varying levels of experience and skill, they all have basically a 25% chance to win. So at the end of the day, it's Candy Land. But set in...Thebes...instead of...Candy Land...
Anyway, the goal here is to wander around Europe researching potential excavation sites and then heading to those sites and using your research to dig up treasure. Treasure is worth VPs, whoever has the most VPs wins. There are a few other ways to earn VPs, but the lion's share of points come from digging. Thebes has one very nice mechanic. One poor contrived mechanic. And one ugly mechanic that seems so clever at first blush, yet probably should have sent the whole design to the reject pile.
The good: Everyone in Thebes has the same amount of time sequences which are measured in weeks. A four player game has two years, or 104 weeks, two players have three years. Moving aroung Europe costs number of weeks based on the distance traveled. Doing research (taking cards from a given location) takes a number of weeks depending on the value of the research. Digging takes a number of weeks chosen by the player, longer digs should yield better results (in theory!). One turn is a move+researching or a move+digging. You calculate the length of the turn, move yourself forward that many weeks on the time track and then it's the next turn. Who takes the next turn? Well that's determined by who is last on the time track. This mechanic allows one player to string together multiple turns. I don't know if Thebes was the first game with this mechanic or not, but it's the first I've played (it was printed in 2007). Olympos uses it as well (printed in 2011). Other games use the "whoever's last goes next" mechanic, like Glen More, but I can't think of one that has the same number of total time sequences like those two. I think it's quite clever because it's fair and allows for strategy. You must balance all your actions against the fixed amount of time in the game.
The bad: The potential benefit of your dig is based on how much research you've done and how much time you are willing to spend digging. You take those two values and consult a chart. That's how many tiles you get to draw from the bag of goodies. Now the chart is actually a magic wheel, but it's just a chart in wheel form. Come on, you can't resolve it more elegantly than a chart? Is this Avalon Hill Napoleonics? Weak sauce.
The ugly: Here's how you decide how well your dig went: There's a bag of 30 tiles for each of five locations. Each bag starts with 14 items/treasures, and 16 blank tiles (chaff). You draw an amount of tiles depending on how much research you did and how long you dig (maximum of 10 tiles). You keep the good stuff and put all the chaff back in the bag. Note that treasure tiles are not evenly valued, they can be worth one, or as much as seven (rare). For example, you can draw 10 tiles, get 3 good itesms worth 4 points. You keep your point tiles and put the 7 crappy blank ones back. Now the bag contains 11 good ones and 16 blank ones for the next guy. He might go and draw 5 tiles, get 3 items worth 8 points and 2 chaff/blanks. Let's say the 3 good ones are worth 8 points. Well that was fun. Oh, and you can only dig in each spot once per year. So if you dig and don't get shit, it's not like you can just try again. And some Dumas with half the research is going to spend five weeks digging and find all the good stuff anyway. Go home noob.
The problem is that between the massive number of tiles in the bag and the different values of the items/treasures, this mechanic has WAY TOO MUCH STATISTICAL VARIATION. One or two playtests would have revealed this problem immediately. And if you can't fix it, skip it.
3/10 - It has two things going for it. 1) I can play it with my kids and we're all on an even playing field. 2) The time/turn mechanic is nifty and evolved board games. If you ask me about this game and I say, "oh yeah, it's sort of interesting, let's play." Don't fall for it. You will never get those 90 minutes of your life back.
I actually have no way to fix this game. Maybe you can work up some mechanic with redraws at previously worked sites, and you can justify those thematically; Well Mike already dug by the river, so I should go somewhere else. But any mechanic will be contrived (hah! like any other game mechanic ever isn't contrived) and require lots of play testing. That's too much of a time investment to get a game from awful to meh.
ReplyDeleteThere's an easy fix. Make half the players Nazis and give them the opportunity to steal whatever another player digs up by creating an elaborate plot to defeat (i.e. kill) the non-Nazi players.
ReplyDeleteIf you make it overwhelmingly likely that the Nazis will win this will even tie into the idea that everyone who plays this game really loses.
Ryan...when you post stuff like this, the terrorists win :(
ReplyDeleteI think we need an ARC tile for this fix.
ReplyDelete