Our final game of the year was Priests of Ra, Reiner Knizia's re-treading of the classic Ra which is published by Rio Grande. The game plays exactly the same as the earlier game but utilises double sided tiles, which the drawing player can choose which side to use, and a tweak to the scoring mechanism, with pyramid pieces being the equivalent of the monuments from the earlier game.

I thought it was very much Ra revisited but the changes made playing a bit more cumbersome. Deciding which way to place tiles gave an extra decision point that added time to the game and made it feel a less elegant design to the original, which remains one of my all-time favourites. My strong first round and Nige's second meant that we were the ones to beat but the Ra tiles were unkind to Guy and Mark G, who were waiting until the bitter end to try and strengthen their collections. The final tally showed me to be a fairly comfortable winner, although I wasn't sure quite how close Nige was going to turn out to be. Putting comparisons to the earlier game aside, this was still a pretty good game with enough differences to make it worth pulling out from time-to-time.