Game Preview: Phoenicia - Designer Preview

By Tom Lehmann
May 21, 2007

Publisher: JKLM Games / Rio Grande Games
Designer: Tom Lehmann
Artwork: Matthias Catrein
Players: 2-5
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 90 minutes
Release Date: June 2-3 2007 (at the UK Games Expo from JKLM) / June/July 2007 (from Rio Grande)
Price: £30 / $34.95

Phoenicia is a game of economic growth and advancement for two to five players. Each player guides the development of a village into one of the great Phoenician city-states: Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Acco, and Arvad.

Each turn, players can initiate auctions for development cards, which give additional workers, storehouses, production, victory points, or new abilities. A player can also train and employ workers in the production technologies they have (initially, just hunting and farming, but mining and clothmaking are available with certain development cards). After all players have done this, they receive income, apply storage limits, and then turn up new development cards to start a new round.

Phoenicia’s design was inspired by Francis Tresham’s Civilization and Jim Hlavaty’s Outpost. I helped Jim develop the Outpost Expert Game in the 1990s. Several years later, I began to wonder whether Outpost could be completely redesigned into a much quicker game with more development options. After getting Jim’s approval (in return for my contributions to the Expert Game), I began to look for an appropriate setting.

As much as I love both science fiction and Outpost, I’ve never liked its corporate theme of colony managers competing to be top planetary manager. (Where are the office politics and backbiting that would inevitably be present in such a setting?)

One shortcoming of many civilization games is that they tend to concentrate on great military empires. What about cultures that were economically and technologically dominant, enduring for over a thousand years, despite never amassing great armies or huge tracts of land? What about the Phoenicians?

The Phoenicians were a Semite people who settled a narrow strip of coastline between the hills of Lebanon and the Mediterranean between 1500-1300 BC. Master traders and builders, they adapted Minoan ship designs, perfecting the bireme and taking over the Egyptian grain trade, following the collapse of the Minoan civilization.

In addition to giving the Greeks the phonetic alphabet, the Phoencians planted colonies and extended Iron Age technology throughout the Western Mediterranean, developed the first transparent glass, created a clothmaking industry (based on a red dye, from spiders, and their famous indigo dye, from a shellfish), and, perhaps, circumnavigated Africa.

Phoenician shipbuilding and navigation expertise were so well known that King Solomon negotiated with Hiram, Prince of Tyre, for Phoenician shipwrights, sailors, and merchants to develop the Red Sea trade (possibly with the Queen of Sheba, unnamed in the Bible but Makeda according to Ethiopian traditions).

Perhaps the greatest Phoenician engineering feat was to maintain silt-free harbors—which is still a challenge in modern times in Eastern Mediterranean ports, requiring frequent dredging—for many hundreds of years by constructing elaborate causeways and breakwaters so that tidal forces would constantly flush away accumulating silt.

Rich but not numerous, the Phoenicians never developed a great military nor united politically. To protect themselves, they both paid tribute at various times and built their cities on islands (such as Tyre) or on peninsulas behind huge city walls (such as Sidon or Byblos). There, supplied by their fleets, they could outwait most besieging forces. (Another stratagem was to offer to carry away besieging armies by sea to other destinations.) Tyre was conquered just once, by Nebuchadnezzar II in 573 BC after a thirteen-year siege, before finally falling to Alexander the Great in 332 BC. This ended the thousand year Phoenician dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean, though their greatest colony, Carthage, survived until 146 BC, before falling to Rome.

This setting struck me as perfect for a game of economic competition and advancement, without political or military activity. With this in mind, I started reworking mechanics.

A lot of time in Outpost is spent dealing and totaling the different production cards, rearranging them when purchasing (since no change is possible), and bidding “one more” than the previous bid. By having just one production deck, allowing change, and scaling costs from 1 to 30, hours of play were eliminated. Production cards average 5 and range from just 4-6, making it easy to estimate a player’s current wealth. ("Hmm… 3 cards, 2 treasury, that’s 17 on average, maximum of 20 if they are all 6s; I’ll bid 19 to be (almost completely) safe.") With this time savings, I expanded the number of different development cards by 50%, adding many new options.

One concern in an economic growth game is catching an early leader. By adding a powerful late technology path (Shipbuilding) and an early victory point path (allowing small economies to secure lots of points while richer ones are still expanding production), I gave players ways to recover in the mid-game from an early mistake or bad luck.

I reduced kingmaking by drastically accelerating the end game. Phoenicia lasts just 9-11 rounds, spread over four sets of development cards. However, players go through both the last two card sets in just three rounds. By the time a player is truly out of it, the game is usually in its final round and then players are mostly just bidding everything they have.

I improved the value of storage by effectively allowing a player who buys a Granary to earn interest when saving. The shorter game length, since there are fewer rounds for growth to compound in, also makes saving to dominate the next round of bidding a much more effective tactic.

The result is a very “tight” game. Players must manage their workers, production, technologies, wealth, storage, and victory points simultaneously.

The biggest design challenge was presentation. Originally, the game was implemented as just a set of cards. Not only was this too fiddly, but it was difficult for players to see each other’s positions (which is important in a bidding game). The next attempt was to provide each player with a large mat. Now, everything could be seen, but the result was too intimidating and confusing for new players.

The final approach was to provide a central board with a common track and discount area (making this information easy to see), and to give each player four tiles, representing their initial villages, which could then be flipped over or added to, as players gained new technologies.

As always, a game changes in response to publisher and playtester comments. David Goering challenged me to do this; Bernd Brunnhofer suggested strengthening the victory point path; Stefan Brück provided valuable insights into the three-player game; the late Keith Loveys came up with rotating the Overlord when tied; Jay Tummelson suggested a first game rule; and Markus Welbourne of JKLM Games, the publisher, advocated reducing the effect of multiple discounts and having an option to reduce luck on the first turn. Thank you. Enjoy!

[Editor’s note: You can try Phoenicia online at JKLM Interactive. The game rules are included on this site.]

[Editor’s note 2: The images aren’t displaying as clearly as they should. Sorry!]

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Gameboard
	Tiles
	A sample card
	Another card

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