My Sportsman of the Year: Joe Thomas
December 19, 2014WFNY’s 12 Days of Christmas, 2014 Edition: Day Ten
December 19, 2014Think you can build the most extravagant and beautiful palace? Grab a starting tile and hire your best contractors. This is Alhambra…
Theme: Palace building
Number of Players: 2-6 (Best with 2-4)
Game Time: 60-75 minutes
Age Appropriateness: 10 and up
Game Type: Hand management, set collecting
In Alhambra, you are adding buildings and gardens to your palace/complex/Alhambra. (Hence the name.) You collect different currencies in order to pay for these buildings, as each builder wants to be paid in their native currency. It has an element of luck to it, but it is also strategic and somewhat puzzle-y.
Game Play: On their turn players may either collect money from the bank, buy and construct a building, buy a building and place it in reserve or swap a tile from their reserve into their Alhambra. If a player can pay for a building with exact change, they get a bonus action. Thus a player could actually purchase all four available buildings on their turn and still collect money from the bank to end their turn. Rare, but possible.
There are rules governing where certain building tiles can be played, including the walls that line most tiles. There are three scoring phases in the game, two of which are activated by cards shuffled into the money deck. The final scoring phase is triggered when the last building tile has been taken from the bag and placed on the market.
The game is scored according to who has collected the most of each type of building and who has the longest continuous wall surrounding their Alhambra. There is a TableTop episode of Alhambra if you are interested in seeing the game played.
Component Quality: The components are good quality, even if they aren’t that exciting to look at. They aren’t unattractive, they are just pictures of different buildings. The look of this game will not entice your 13 year-old to the table for game night.
The board in the picture is from the ‘gold’ edition. It is not included in the standard game, nor do you really need it. It is nicer than the components in the regular edition (which is the one I own.)
My Take: Alhambra is a good game, and can be used as a gateway game for new gamers. It isn’t generally the kind of game that is going to grab people and get them excited—unless they enjoy puzzles. I’m not really talking about jig-saw puzzles, but figuring out how things best go together. Designers will likely enjoy this game.
The game can move along fairly quickly if you are playing with those that know how the game works. If you are playing with a group of newcomers it can slow down a bit. In a large game your turn can seem to take a little while to come back to you.
There is some light tension in the game, mainly from hoping a building available in the market makes it through to your turn. Players that recognize your need for a certain type of building may block you from it by buying it ahead of you. (I’ve been known to do that on occasion.)
Affordability: $35-55 (Depending on edition.)
Expansions and Replay-ability: There are actually a number of expansions available for Alhambra, most of which add buildings to the game or add another component for scoring. Disclosure: I have not played any expansions for this game, nor do I have any interest in paying around $20 for an expansion that contains 8 new tiles and a few new rules. You can purchase a Big Box edition that includes the base game and expansions together. The base game I find very enjoyable to play still.
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Board Game News and Notes:
I wrote Wednesday morning’s While We’re Waiting.., and mentioned a few items I will bring up again here.
– The Malted Meeple is a new game café coming to the Hudson, Ohio area. They are calling themselves a local hangout for craft beer, board games and mega milkshakes. The word is they hope to open in January.
– The TableTop Café in Ohio City has been working towards opening for a while now, and hopefully are getting close. The owner tells me that they have just been waiting on a few permits and licenses from the city. No grand opening date has been set yet.
– When either of these two places opens I would LOVE to host a WFNY gaming night. Who’s in?
– I am in the process of converting my old thoughts from previous WWWs on games to this game review format, so you will see more of these in the coming weeks as well as some reviews of all-new games. You can bookmark the board game tag if you are interested in these types of posts.
– Eldritch Horror released an expansion, Mountains of Madness. While Eldritch Horror isn’t really my kind of game, I know it has been immensely popular and many have been eagerly awaiting an expansion.
– Cheesonomics is an Eagle-Gryphon game that was successfully kick-started and I believe is in production now that looks like a really interesting family style game.
Remember, the holidays are a great time to play some games with your family!
3 Comments
This is a terrific series. As I mentioned, I ordered a couple games based on your reviews.
Our family enjoys word games like Quiddler, bananagrams. Card games. Traditional board games like Clue. A favorite when extended family is around is Tripoley. We just keep lending each other money to help each other stay in the game (change). A couple of us break out our change stash and just spread it around to start the game. Fun for young and old; # of players not an issue. I think being able to have unrelated conversations while the game is going on is a huge plus.
If you’re interested in featuring word games sometime, I’d be interested!
Thanks again Greg!
You know I am always up for a game night!