Pyramid Pick
Attika
Published by Rio Grande Games
Designed by Marcel-André Casasola Merkle
Graphics by Manuel Casasola Merkle
full-color boxed game with 22 game board tiles, four shrines, 15 wooden amphoras, four player storage boards, 120 building tiles, 60 landscape cards, & rulebook; $32.95
When you first pull this Rio Grande game out, be prepared for the inevitable snickers and cheers of "Attika! Attika! Attika!" Simply accept that this must be done; once the players have gotten it out of their system, you can get down to business.
The object of Attika is to be the first player to connect two temples with a line of your structures or, barring that, to get all your tiles onto the board. Attika is designed for two to four players.
The shrines are small cardboard stand-ups on their own hexagonal bases. These abut the game board tiles. Game board tiles are macrohexes -- that is, they are hex-shaped and comprise seven smaller hexes for play. The boards are placed randomly to form the initial playing surface, and each is peppered with landscape symbols showing hills, water, etc. These match the landscape cards; everything you build has a cost in resources, paid by the landscape symbols you build on or by the cards in your hand.
Your buildings are kept face down in four stacks, one with all the main buildings and three with the ancillary structures. Each player has a storage board (not to be confused with the playing boards on the playing surface), a play mat that shows all these buildings . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 5, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.