Attika! Attika!

One of my wife's favorite games is Attika. It has some resource management, some tile-laying, multiple paths to victory and some nice screwage elements. It scales excellently from two to four players. While the graphic design of the player mats isn't fantastic, it is functional, and the tiles and other bits are quite nice. (All images from Boardgamegeek.com)

The goal of the game is to either build all of your tiles onto the hex board or to connect the two Temples with your tiles. Tiles generally are placed by playing resource cards, but can be placed for free if laid in the right order.

A couple of days ago I set up Attika for two players on our pub table and last night Carol and I finally got down to playing.

The two player set up is essentially this:

I had a great opening game, quickly shooting across the center of the board and threatening a connection victory within the first four turns. It was all Carol could do to block me, but she managed it. I was also able to contain Carol to a small area on one side of the board. She made the mistake of laying a couple of tiles away from her main group and I immediately isolated them, making it incredibly expensive for her to lay further unconnected tiles, limiting her flexibility. This gave me control of large chunks of the board which only worsened for Carol as we added new hex tiles and I blocked them from her access.

And then . . . something happened. I'm not entirely sure what. The first couple of times I laid a new hex tile, I tried to connect to the second temple. I was blocked by Carol. This may have distracted me from playing tiles as quickly as I could. It also lead to a near disaster as she came perilously close to running around me and making her own temple connection late in the game. I barely stopped her.

Finally, it came down to me with two tiles left and her with four tiles or so. My last two tiles, a Tower and the Vintner, required two hill cards each. Unluckily, the last hex tile I laid had no hills on it at all, which meant I had to draw four hill cards or play two other cards for each hill I didn't have. My bad luck continued as I was not drawing hill cards. I couldn't draw back fast enough to stop Carol from playing all her remaining tiles.

So, a frustrating loss for me, a good, tight win for Carol. She never gave up and aggressive, clever play with a little luck allowed her to take the victory.