We continue our sojourn through the cards of GMT’s upcoming, now P-500 listed, second game of the “Ancient Civilizations” series: Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (ACME) GMT Games – Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East [the first game of the series is Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea GMT Games – Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (ACIS)].
ACME provides ten (10!) Resource cards… these represent the Ancient World’s ways of providing unexpected benefits to a Civilization in the form of disks and/or wealth (mina).
Please note cards are generally played sequentially by Civilization after the Deployment Phase which places disks upon the map. For an explanation and example of game Phases leading up to the Card Phase, see: Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (ACME) Example of Play Part 1 of 3: Game Set-Up through Growth Phase – Inside GMT blog As to the Card Phase itself, see: Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (ACME) Example of Play Part 2 of 3: Card Phase through Competition Phase – Inside GMT blog Do recall play of any of these cards can be negated through an appropriate NEGATE card.
Advanced Agriculture and Improved Irrigation: These cards have the same effect of adding two of your Civilization’s disks into a Land area it controls.. yes, CONTROLS. This card can’t be played to add disks into a CONTESTED area… that is, a playable Land area must be exclusively occupied by one or more disks of your Civilization’s color. These cards are nice for converting one of your Camps (a single disk) or Settlements (two disks) into a Victory Point generating City of 3-4 disks. The timing of play can be important… play one of these cards too early and you’ve created a target for another jealous Civilization’s ire. Play too late, you may no longer have that friendly controlled Land area in your possession.
Coinage: This is a rare “the rich get richer” card. If your Civilization is blessed with the sophistication of numerous Cities, this card will generate a windfall of mina into its treasury. The Cities can even be engaged for Competition during the upcoming Competition Phase, they simply must be on the map at the instant this card is played. Having mina is a powerful Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East advantage as they can be used a resource for Temple-building and, importantly, generally able to be exchanged in lieu of sustaining one of your disk losses from either an opponent’s card play or from resolving a Competition. In ACME being rich is good indeed!
New Salt Mines Open: This is a handy card to have to expand into, or reinforce, two adjacent areas (Land or Sea) from a Desert or Sea area “base” containing a disk of your Civilization. The “base” can be an area either Controlled or Contested.
Grain Storehouses: Here’s an Investment (I) card with a bit of a twist from similar ACME Investment cards. It removes four of your Civilization’s disks from circulation; but once placed on this card, these disks can be removed whenever needed in lieu of losing one or more disks from the map either through card play or during a Competition. Additionally, this card prevents Competition disk losses through an opponent’s play of cards 32: Siege or 35: Blockade. These two formidable Competition cards cancel a Civilization’s ability to negate a disk loss by exchanging a card or mina: the loss must be sustained… but that’s not the case with Grain Storehouses which negates the loss through removing a disk from this Investment card to satisfy a map disk loss!
Tomb Raiders and Sunken City: These cards each deliver an excellent pay-off, a disk, two mina, as well as a Victory Point! One is for a Desert or Mountain Land area and the other a Sea area. The catch is the area must be vacant… for each card reflects your Civilization’s spirit of discovery and adventure. See the next section of this article for exposition on how to deal with this “vacant area” requirement if it presents an obstacle.
Mountain of Gold, Oasis, and Fishing Grounds: These three Investment (I) cards have the distinction, and benefit, of not removing any of your Civilization’s disks to populate that card. These cards have white disks placed upon them instead (thereby keeping your Civilization’s colored disks available for other purposes).
To play one of these cards requires a vacant area to deploy one of your own disks into… in effect “discovering” that wealth producing area. This is a good way for a Civilization to “beam into” (ala Star Trek) an area distant from its home environs… for example Egypt placing a disk and the Mountain of Gold card’s colored cube (gold colored, of course) in the vacant Mountain area of Bactria or an Egyptian disk and a blue colored cube for Fishing Grounds in a vacant North Caspian Sea area.
Readers are reminded that an ACME Epoch turn encompasses many, many, years: a time sufficient for a group of determined and brave stalwarts to traverse vast distances and establish a kind of colony, a Camp, far away from their point of origin. There are numerous examples of this during antiquity… e.g. the Phoenicians and their far-flung colonies.
Should the map get occupied by other Civilization and/or Barbarian disks so the needed vacant area to place a disk for one of these Resource Investment Cards is unavailable; never fear, there are ACME cards (to be covered in upcoming installments of this series) which can make an area vacant of any disk occupation (written with an evil-sounding, hand-wringing “heh, heh, heh”)! However, beware another Civilization taking over the area and reaping the benefits, a mina each turn, by seizing the Resource site from you.
An example of two of these Resource Investment Cards’ use can be found in this link to an ACME After-Action-Report [complete with Designer Mark McLaughlin’s Egyptians picking on his ever loyal Game Developer’s Babylonians… all in good friendly spirits, of course ; – ) ] The New Hampshire Guys Visit Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (Well, at Least via the Game) – Inside GMT blog This was a fun game which saw both the Oasis and Fishing Grounds cards used.
Closing Remark by ACME Game Developer Fred Schachter: Please pose any question or request for additional information regarding this article using InsideGMT’s feature for conveying such. Coming up next will be the first article of a new Chapter to this series. This will encompass the “regular” cards, for good or ill, of Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East!
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