Like stumbling upon a idyllic glade with an ice cream van in it after several days hacking through the jungle, three gamers found the beautiful vista of an empty table before them on a Wednesday evening. What to play? We decided upon UR, the civilisation-development game of ancient Mesopotamia. This has been sitting in my cupboard for about a year now, biding it's time, waiting for us to declare it one of the great underrated gems of gaming.
However it's wait may go on a little, as the jury is currently out.
It's a game of contrasts. The rules are brief, yes, but they are badly written and fail to make clear at least two aspects of the game that we had to decide on ourselves. The game is - relatively - brief too, but it contains plentiful opportunities for AP. And the mechanics are actually very good - but they lie beneath a theme so flimsy that you can see the cogs turning beneath it. The rules may say you're developing politics or culture but when the upshot of it is moving the same cubes around the board as when you develop agriculture or go to war, what tends to happen is Adam says "I'll do purple" and Andrew says "I'll do green".
The board is made up of 6x6 tiles that you deal out randomly. The tiles are double-sided and each side contains an 'action'. You also have a tile in your hand, and on your turn you can either 'action' both sides of your tile, or just one of them (and add a cube to your presence on the board) or neither (and add two cubes to your presence on the board, or occupy a new tile with one cube). These actions are the four mentioned above, plus politics. All of them amount to cube movement. A final option is sacrificing both actions to build a 'ziggurat' on a tile you occupy, which guarantees you the tile it sits on and gets you points at the game's end.
After your turn you swap your tile with any unoccupied tile on the board, and someone else says "I'll do blue". And when the game ends you score the tiles you own: like the monuments in Ra, you score sets; and the ziggurats can either function as jokers or sneakily allow you to claim a set of six, even though there are only five colours.
After a first play we very much stroking our chins, and still coming to terms with all the ins and outs of the strategy:
Sam 28
Adam 24
Andrew 21
So we gave it another go. This time we expanded a lot more on the board, and got our heads around the advantages of the different actions. It was hard to say who was going to win, and as we went through a slightly protracted endgame, and at one stage Andrew looked very strong, with almost half the board to himself. But he was thinly spread, so both Adam and I nabbed tiles off him; and he didn't have a war action to claim them back.
I was hopeful of a second victory, but I should have known better:
Adam 43
Sam 39
Andrew 30
We all made significant improvements in our scores from the previous game, but none more so than the Curdled Whey, who begins his march up the leaderboard.
And Ur? Well, we're still scratching our chins on that one. It really wears it's mechanics on it's sleeve, and so is perhaps a little abstract for our group. But it has some neat things about it, like the changing board of tiles, and the fact you can guess what you're opponent is planning by which tile they pick up. I can see why it gets some love on the geek. If it doesn't get repeated plays from us, I can imagine keeping it as a very good two-player.
On the Leaderboard Andrew's brief sojourn at the summit is over, though he remains camped close by. They do say the cream rises to the top, don't they? Or is that custard?
| Points | ||||||
| Adam | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 9 |
| Andrew | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 11 |
| Steve | 1 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 12 |
| Sam | 2 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 14 |
| Joe | 3 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 14 |
| Hannah | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Anja | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 17 |
| Jonny | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
