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Heir to the Pharaoh
45m - 60m
2 - 2 Players
Ages 10+
This mechanic requires you to place a bid, usually monetary, on items in an auction of goods in order to enhance your position in the game. These goods allow players future actions or improve a position. The auction consists of taking turns placing bids on a given item until one winner is established, allowing the winner to take control of the item being bid on. Usually there is a game rule that helps drop the price of the items being bid on if no players are interested in the item at its current price.
Auction/Bidding
Hand management games are games with cards in them that reward players for playing the cards in certain sequences or groups. The optimal sequence/grouping may vary, depending on board position, cards held and cards played by opponents. Managing your hand means gaining the most value out of available cards under given circumstances. Cards often have multiple uses in the game, further obfuscating an "optimal" sequence.
Hand Management
The primary goal of a set collection mechanic is to encourage a player to collect a set of items.
Set Collection
Tile Placement games feature placing a piece to score VPs, with the amount often based on adjacent pieces or pieces in the same group/cluster, and keying off non-spatial properties like color, "feature completion", cluster size etc.
Tile Placement
Variable Player Powers is a mechanic that grants different abilities and/or paths to victory to the players.
Variable Player Powers
Ancient
Animals
57.00
€
30 day low:
Out of stock
Search for:
Kickstarter – Gamefound
Board Games
Strategy
Family and Children
Party
Adult
Thematic
Ελληνικα Παιχνιδια
LCG
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
The Lord of The Rings: The Card Game
RPGs
D & D
Pathfinder
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EmpressGeek
[b]Rating based on - 8 plays, 2 player[/b] Heir to the Pharaoh is a 2 player only auction and area control game with an Egyptian theme and some spatial reasoning tossed in for fun. One person plays as Bast the cat goddess, while the other takes on the role of Anubis the dog headed god, and over the course of 8 rounds both are trying to impress the Pharaoh in order to gain his kingdom. To do this most effectively, they call upon the favour of the various gods to help them build various monuments and/or gain points - Seshat allows you to place monuments on the board, while Geb & Nut allow you to alter their facing, Ptah encourages you to begin collecting sets of monument cards which are worth increasing numbers of points the more you have, and if you're favoured by the sun god Ra then you place your tokens out on the board scoring 1 point immediately and at game end scoring double the points for your longest unbroken chain, while Wadjet grants you animal magic cards that have special powers such as "Exchange your bid with that of your opponent. You must exchange your bids, even if you do not want to!" or "This turn, the lower bid wins." which can let you mix up your strategies and surprise your opponent, as well as gain 1 point per card at game end. Also at game end there is a 7 point award for having the most pyramid tiles in your colour, but the lion's share of the points comes from the monuments that have been placed out on the board during the game. If you own a monument that points at other monuments via the arrow facings of the tiles on which they are placed, then you score points for those monuments equal to their value. If your monument points at the pyramid, then you score points equal to the value of that monument. The player with the most points wins the keys to the kingdom! An auction game that not just works with 2 but is [i]specifically[/i] for 2??? Get out of town!!! :p Neither of us likes auction games to begin with, but we liked our first few plays quite a bit. So much so, that I went and ordered the deluxe wooden pieces all the way from the US of A to pimp out my copy. Sadly, from the very next time we played it the love had gone. I loved the art style and the vibrant colours of the board, plus the box cover is very striking. The auction wasn't onerous at all so it wasn't even that. I liked determining which gods to bid on depending on which monuments and arrow facing tiles were up for auction, and I think it's really interesting how the cards with which you bid pass to your opponent for the next round so you have to weigh up whether it's worth it to you to go in hard for some of these gods knowing that you'll be making your opponent's hand stronger for future rounds, but overall we think it too long and too repetitive for what it is, and I found that generally by round four I was getting impatient and looking at the board to see how many more rounds we'd got left. I tried shortening it up by blanking out a couple of the non-scoring rounds, but the game is actually perfectly balanced as it is so that just felt odd and unnatural. I feel that by the time you've played this 5 or 6 times you've seen all there is to see, used the tricks at your disposal, and then it becomes rote and rather predictable which is a shame because I feel like a lot of thought and care went into the game design. Not for us in the end. [b]Status: TRADED for Theseus: The Dark Orbit[/b]
mjk280
This game has some stuff going for it but there's one particular issue it has: both players have to be on a specific wavelength for it to work as well as it can. If players bet with the most powerful cards all the time, the game devolves into "one good turn, one bad turn" for both you and your opponent. You have to play with nuance and try to find spots where you can win bets with a mid-range card. The problem is that if you do that, you risk losing anyways and the payoff really isn't that spectacular. It also bears repeating that if your opponent doesn't care about any of this subtlety, you're still destined for the "one good, one bad" turn phenomenon even if you yourself really want to play the game as deftly as possible. You can get around this by playing cards that change things up like "this round, the lowest bid wins", but there's not a ton of variety and about half of them basically amount to winning the round because you briefly changed the rules completely. I think all the little scoring mechanics are interesting in how they form the whole of the game, but after a few plays it was still difficult to form a particular strategy other than "score points some way, somehow". Bonus point for the artwork which looks like it was done completely with markers, which was a nice and unique touch.
BanthaFather
Solid game. There is always a lot to do, and the game feels pretty balanced. Points seem heavily dependent on who controls monuments, but I sense that with more experience, strategies will deepen. The auction system is fantastic, the theme is perfect, and the gameplay is smooth. Feels a little on the long side, but my wife and I are really enjoying our time with it.