Ancient: Mesopotamia

The Architects of Amytis

The King of Babylon wants to offer a marvelous present to his wife, Queen Amytis: The most beautiful city ever created. He asks two of the best Architects in the world to design the city, and only the very best one will be built. It's now up to you to create the best design.

Les Architectes d'Amytis ("Architects of Amytis") is a Tile placement game, containing some worker placement and even some "Tic Tac Toe" mechanisms.

During your turn, you'll have to select a tile among the available ones on the main board, and place one of your Architect Pawn on the corresponding pile. Then, you'll place the tile on your board wherever you want (on a free spot, or covering another tile to make your city grow higher). Each tile is colored and represents a building type. Buildings all have 2 types of scoring.

Each building type will score directly when you place the tile. And the colors will allow you to reproduce some of the King's projects (a colored pattern inside your city) that will grant you points at the end of the game. Furthermore, while placing your architects on the main board, if you manage to create a line, row or diagonal of 3, you'll be granted a King's favor: another type of score, triggered at the end of the game.

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur

Set in ancient Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization, at a time when the location of Ur was a coastal region, players work to build the Great City of Ur, expand its districts, and establish themselves as powerful builders.

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur features a stunning board showing the city of Ur divided into 5 regions, each tied to a specific color die. There are 3 building districts, 1 temple district, and 1 port district.

Each turn, your worker will activate one of these districts. When activating a district, you must first take a die from the district. This die matches the color of the district and serves two functions:

1) The die itself becomes a resource of its color.
2) The value of the die determines which district your worker will activate on the following turn.

Through various actions you will be able to expand your influence in the various districts, expanding construction sites and turning them into buildings to score valuable victory points. But you will also exert your influence in the temple district in order to earn the king's favor. In the port district you can obtain ships with important abilities and for scoring victory points.

You must spend your actions wisely and always make sure that you keep an eye on the general timing of the game. The moment a district is emptied of dice, a scoring will occur.

—description from publisher