We then tried this game from a couple of years ago by Martin Wallace. Although I got it at the time, I’ve never played it until now but I’m sure it won’t be long before it makes a reappearance as we all enjoyed it a lot. The game is set in the Mediterranean and is about the expansion of four empires through the area. Players try to establish cities or ships in regions controlled by the largest empires as, at the end of the game, each region controlled by a player scores points dependent on the empires relative size, with city controlled regions scoring near enough twice as many points as ship controlled areas. So the primary objective is to be able to build cities with a secondary objective of having your ships alone in non-city controlled regions, while attempting to thwart others from doing the same. This is achieved through collecting and spending cards on various actions such as building ships, moving ships and building cities.

There is a trading element but in our game the green empire remained tiny, making the green cards near worthless. (This may have been because we neglected to take account of the bonus for establishing cities in all four empires). This meant that more often than not we were trading green cards with the bank rather than other players. As the game neared its conclusion, I switched to getting as many ships in ports as I could and this gave me enough points for the win. This surprised me a bit, as John had done very well to establish most cities in the largest empire and I thought he was in the best position. He only scored 4 ship points though whereas Nige got 15 and I amassed 21. We all found this to be very tense with plenty to think about. Often, you had to adapt your plans to take account of the cards you acquired but, even when you didn’t get the ideal cards, you could usually do something to help your position. Another good game from Martin, which hasn’t got the same reputation as some of his others but is still a fine production and nicely put together by Kosmos.