Parthenon
Another attempt to do a Civilization-like game,
and considering the game's unusual origins.
Parthenon is a new game from the newly-prolific
Z-Man Games; it's yet another civilization-building type game, this time with a
vaguely Settlers-esque appeal.
Each
player becomes the leader of an island in the Aegean, attempting to make their
name in the world. Unlike in Settlers or Civilization, there is no map
– everything is handled abstractly. You start with a couple villages
that produce a single basic good (Grain, Grapes, Olives, Wool, etc.)
automatically at the beginning of each turn. The rest of your building options
are represented by a handful of cards, and include a couple more production
villages, workshops, temples, ports, marketplaces,
etc.
The immediate thing that you
realize about this game is that given the goods you produce on your home island,
you literally cannot build anything beyond your first couple production
buildings (several costs are, in fact, expressed in terms of "goods you don't
produce"). Of the 6 basic goods available, you will have villages for only 3. Of
the 4 rare goods available (tools, pottery, spices, and papyrus), you will be
able to produce only one.
So, to do
anything at all, you'll need to trade. This involves either finding a compliant
fellow-player to trade with (each of the islands produces a different selection
of standard or rare goods, so this shouldn't be too hard) or journeying to
neighboring lands, which function much like the ports in Settlers, giving you
various X:1 trading options. The journeying process is neat but fairly random,
as you load up your goods and protective cards on ships and then draw cards to
see what hazards they face, with nearer locations (Athens, Sparta, Ionia) being
a lot less risky than further ones (Egypt, Carthage, and Rome), but the risker
destinations also offer much better trade rates, as you would
expect.
Whenever I play new games from
a company I don't have much experience with, I always find myself reading the
credits – mainly looking over the playtesters, seeing if it's anyone
I recognize, seeing if a developer is credited, etc. On perusing the Parthenon
credits late in the game, I saw something unusual – the game is derived
from a game used as a team-building exercise, presumably for corporate
customers. As I read this, everything became clear to me. The game forces you to
trade with your fellow-players to do anything at all, because virtually all of
your own resources are useless to you. The huge randomness of the trade
expeditions and the brutal and somewhat arbitrary random events that pop up each
turn might actually be desirable in such a game, as the players are forced to
"pull together". Unfortunately these things just don't make for a terrifically
compelling social game (and, I should say, if I wanted a team-building game at
work I'd think that having everyone round for a game of Lord of the Rings might
work better). Anytime you are forced down a certain approach to the game it's
not good – compare to Settlers, where you can either do the best with
what you've got, or try to do better by trading. And the large and essentially
arbitrary effects of the events is going to be frustrating and a turn-off for
most serious gamers. We're not talking events that force you to lose half your
cards if you're holding too many; many events wipe out your entire
inventory.
There are a couple more
minor gaffes here as well... one of my rules of gaming is that a game should end
while you still have choices. One of my complaints about Advanced Civilization,
for example, is that it will typically end with one or two players acquiring all
the Civilization cards. For the last few turns of the game, these players are
just "buying out the string", acquiring whatever they can afford rather than
making real choices about what they need. Compare to Settlers: Cities and
Knights, where players are making choices right until the end. In Parthenon, the
victory conditions involve just buying up everything in your inventory. Combine
this with the fact that only a few of these buildings are very useful at all,
and things seem off.
I'd really like to
give Parthenon a passing grade (say, a 3 out of 5). The theme is great and
well-realized. The graphics are very nice and evocative. I think the whole
journeying mechanic for visiting foreign lands is well-done and fairly
well-balanced. But ultimately I can't do it, and it ends up being rated around a
2 for me. This is a game with a high price point ($50 retail) and long playing
time (2+ hours), and given that, there just aren't enough choices, the game is
too constrained, the event cards are too random, and ultimately too many
balances are out of whack. I think if Z-Man had been able to cut the price point
back to under $30 retail (there are a truly excessive number of cards in the
box) and the play length to 60 minutes, things would be better. But at the
current price point, it's very hard to recommend.
Posted: Monday - October 24, 2005 at 06:42 PM