Game: Architekton
Year: 2005
Designer: Michael Schacht
Publisher: Queen Games
Key Details: 2 players, about a half hour
Gameplay Score: 5/10
Theme Score: 3/10
Overview of Play: This is a very simple tile-placement game. On your turn, you take two tiles from stock of six tiles that are face up. Tiles will either show a building or a landscape (earth, meadow, water, forest). You then place those tiles adjacent to ones that are already on the table (two random landscape tiles are put out at the beginning of the game).
You have to lay the tiles in a checkerboard pattern, with the landscape and building tiles alternating. If you place a building tile, you put one of your house markers on it. If laying a tile means that a building tile is close in on all four sides, you score that tile—and here’s where things are a bit rough. If all four sides of the building tile match the surrounding landscapes, you get one point. But for every side that doesn’t match the landscape tile touching it, you lose one point. It gets pretty brutal pretty fast—and if you can’t ever pay up, you lose (each player starts with one victory point, and you can discard your house to pay one less).
Once the stock can no longer be replenished, the players take one last turn, and then the game ends. You remove all building tiles that are only joined to one or two landscape tiles, and then each player gets points for their largest group of connected houses—this is where the bulk of the points come from. Winner is the person who gets the most points.
Comments on Use of Theme: At the top of the rulebook, the game declares:
Players build a town in Ancient Greece in friendly competition with each other. But there is a catch. Each building must be surrounded by the appropriate scenery otherwise points are deducted.
Compared to some of the games I’ve discussed so far, there’s not much to this blurb. But what’s there is telling. First off is the idea that it’s a “friendly competition.” Right away we start to see a certain idealized version of the Greeks as builders—which is strengthened almost immediately by the reference “the appropriate scenery.”
What we have here, then, is very much a Romantic view of the Greeks as being in touch with nature, in contrast with the city-dwelling Romans who destroyed nature. The main theme is really the idea of integrating buildings into the landscape in a way that matches the landscape. Although the building tiles don’t include a theater, the differences between Greek and Roman theaters is often taken to exemplify the two cultures’ view of the world around them. While Greeks would build their theaters on hillsides, so that the seating area would use the natural incline, the Romans would build their theaters against hillsides, so that the seats would be facing towards the hill—and that the Romans would have to build the whole area for the seats.
All in all, the underlying concept is that marble Greek buildings are beautiful and part of a natural cityscape, whereas concrete Roman buildings are less attractive, and part of a cityscape. In this sense, it’s hard to imagine this game having a Roman theme.
There aren’t many components in the game, but what there is reinforces this broad theme. The main ones are the tiles (it is a tile-placing game after all!), which are split between landscapes and buildings. The landscapes aren’t particularly Greek (there’s earth, meadow, water, and forest), but they’re not not Greek, either.
The buildings themselves are readily identifiable as Greek. There are eight different types, and each type appears two or three times. The most recognizable ones are temples, since one looks like the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis. This temple (my favorite in Greece) is distinguished by its odd porch that sticks out on its South side, which is sometimes called the Maiden Porch because instead of columns, the roof is supported by Caryatids, columns in the shape of women captured from the Greek town of Karyai.
There’s also a small temple that recalls that of Athena Nike, also on the Acropolis of Athens. Like that temple, it’s not peripteral, meaning it doesn’t have columns all the way around it like, say, the Parthenon does (though this one looks more like a Roman temple, since there don’t appear to be any columns at the back). The biggest temple is in the Doric order, but its square shape is wrong, since Doric temples tended to be more than twice as long as they were wide.
Other buildings suggest public or domestic architecture, and include one that looks like a farmhouse, one that may be a small stoa, and another that looks like half of a gymnasium. Overall, there’s enough variety to back up the idea that the players are slowly building a town, rather than just building temples.
A nice piece of detail is that some of the buildings include the bright colors that we know would have been on temples. The smallest temple, for instance, has its columns painted blue, and that temple and the other temples have blue in their metopes. The buildings are still left mostly white (and the roofs the red of their tiles), but the little touches of color both help brighten up the game’s appearance and reflect a certain amount of research behind the buildings.
The other components are the “houses,” wooden pieces you put on a building tile that you play. They’re called houses, but their profile looks more like a pedimental temple. The wooden components are nice enough, and giving them any kind of shape beyond a simple cube adds a nice touch.
The final components are the victory point tiles. As we’ve seen with most of these games, the victory points are an obvious place to introduce flavor. Here, the tiles show what looks like a fifth-century silver Athenian tetradrachm, famous for the owl shown on the reverse. The coin does not include any of the lettering that we see on such coins, but the art is unmistakable. Again, there’s enough attention to detail here to help support the overall theme.
There’s one other aspect of thematic flavor that merits attention: the spelling of the title. The Greek word for architect is ἀρχιτέκτων, which can be transliterated as architekton. Giving the game a Greek name is a nice touch, and it’s worth thinking about how different the expectations would be of a game called “Architect” as opposed to “Architekton.” You can get a lot of mileage out of the little details! (It helps, of course, that this one of the many Greek words that has come into English, so it’s immediately recognizable even to those who know no Greek.)
Overall, then, there’s not a ton of theme here, and none that really drives the gameplay. But what’s here is part of a larger story of how the Greeks have been viewed in the modern era, and is employed to give a certain ambience to what is ultimately a light, pretty game.
Overall Thoughts: When I first got this game, I played it once, and thought it sucked. It took me over 10 years—and starting this blog—to get me to play it again. And I’m glad I did. It’s a nice, straightforward tile-placement game, and I could see using it to teach people that style of game.
The negative scoring thing is possibly the most interesting aspect, but it’s also the most frustrating. But it gives a nice bit of meatiness to an otherwise straightforward head-to-head game. I’m going to work this into my regular rotation of two-player games.
It’s fast, and easy to learn, and so could be useful in a classroom setting, but the gameplay doesn’t offer much for that kind of audience. Perhaps the best way to use the game would be to talk about the variety of buildings on the tiles. That could be a good way to look at Greek architecture, or a decent student project.