Game: Agamemnon
Year: 2016
Designer: Günter Cornett
Publisher: Osprey Games
Key Details: 2 players, 15–20 minutes
Gameplay Score:5/10
Theme Score: 7/10
Overview of Play:
This is a two-player tile-laying game. With a couple exceptions, the rules are very straightforward (the rulebook in some ways makes them more complicated than they actually are because they’re poorly written and don’t give enough (good) examples), and the game is quick.
The board is a series of nodes connected by three different types of “string” tiles, each one of which is scored a different way. The Strength Strings are based on highest total strength along the line; the Leadership Strings are won by whichever player has the highest rank leader on the line; and the Force Strings are won by whoever has the most connected nodes along it.
Players take turns revealing two of their tiles, and then playing them on open nodes. There are three main types of tiles: warriors, leaders, and weavers. Warriors simply have a numerical value, from 1 to 3. Leaders have ranks from A (the highest) to E (the lowest), as well as the same kind of strength as warriors. There are two types of weaver tiles, the Weft and the Warp. The former allows you to change two line types around; the latter lets you break up a line.
Once all but two nodes have pieces on them, players score the strings. Whoever has taken the most string tiles wins the game.
Comments on Use of Theme:
This is an abstract game, but the choice, and use, of the theme elevates it.
This game is a great example of the ways in which Homer, the Iliad, and the Trojan War as a whole have all been muddled together. The back page of the rules lists all of the heroes in the game, referring to them as the “Leaders of the Iliad.” But this list includes the Trojan allies Memnon, leader of the Ethiopians, and the Amazon Penthesilea, who don’t appear in the Iliad and belong instead to what we call the “Epic Cycle,” a series of early Greek epic poems that fill out the stories of the heroic age.
This kind of confusion is the reason that students are perpetually surprised when they take a Greek Civilization course, or Greek epic course, and read the Iliad for the first time, and realize that it doesn’t include such details as the Trojan Horse, or Achilles’ heel. Even though Homer’s Iliad only covers about a month and a half in the ninth year of the war, “Homer” has become synonymous with the story of the Trojan War.
The inclusion of Penthesilea and Memnon, though, allows for the game to have an element of diversity, since Penthesilea is the only famous woman to fight at Troy, and as an Ethiopian, Memnon is one of the few people in Greco-Roman myth explicitly labeled as black. These two are also a lot more famous than other Trojan heroes, so it makes sense to work in the biggest names.
The ten heroes are divided into five pairs (the Greeks are on the left, and Trojans on the right):
A1: Agamemnon Aeneas
B3: Odysseus Memnon
C4: Achilles Hector
D3: Ajax Penthesilea
E2: Menelaus Paris
Each member of a pair has identical stats (A1–B3–C4–D3–E2), which means that Agamemnon and Aeneas are identical in terms of how they function in the game.
The pairings are nice from a thematic standpoint, since so much of the combat in the Iliad involves one-on-one fights—most famously Hector and Achilles, but also Menelaus and Paris. None of the other pairs fights, however, and Memnon and Penthesilea aren’t even in the Iliad (Achilles kills both of them in the Aethiopis, which relates what happens at Troy immediately after the events of the Iliad).
Pairing the Greek leader, Agamemnon, with Aeneas only makes sense in light of Aeneas’ later role as the founder of the Roman race (as most famously told in Vergil’s Aeneid). He does appears in the Iliad, but doesn’t fight particularly well. His main adversary, Diomedes, is perhaps the most odd omission on the Greek side—though I’ll admit that I’m biased.
The fact that heroes have two values—strength and leadership—is also a nice nod to the differences between heroes in the Iliad. Agamemnon is the leader of the Greek forces, but far from the best warrior; it makes sense, then, that he has the lowest strength value, and Achilles has the highest.
Not all of the valuations are as obvious, though, and one could quibble with this. But again, as I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, no selective list like this will ever make everyone happy. So, while it’s possible to point out heroes that the game overlooks, this is a pretty good list—even if the ranks and pairings are a bit odd.
Incidentally, this idea of pairing of Greek and Trojan warriors goes as far back as antiquity. The second-century CE travel writer Pausanias (5.22.2) tells us of a series of statues of such pairs in the city of Apollonia (there it’s Achilles-Memnon, Odysseus-Helenus, Menelaus-Paris, Ajax-Deiphobus, Diomedes-Aeneas). The differences in the lists just goes to show that there’s no obvious pairings for all of these heroes, so it’s not like the designer has overlooked anything, let alone made any kind of egregious error.
The instructions include a nice paragraph about each hero, so you could learn a little if you wanted to. As with the heroes chosen, the details in the booklet aren’t actually limited to the Iliad. For instance, it mentions Aeneas’ connection with Rome, the Trojan Horse, and Achilles’ heel (our first extant story about Achilles’ heel comes from about 700 years after the Iliad). But the game doesn’t force any of this on you; each player gets a guide to their pieces, but these don’t have the leaders’ names, so you won’t ever see—let alone use—these names unless you go to the rulebook.
The idea of fate is the coolest part of the game’s Greek theme, especially connecting it with the idea of weaving. As early as Homer, the “string” of a person’s fate is said to be determined at birth (e.g. Iliad 20.127–8). This connection is perhaps clearest in the name of the Fate, Klotho, which comes from the verb klôthô, ‘I spin.’
This issue of fate and the amount of control the gods have over human lives (and their own lives) is a central concern of a lot of epic poetry, and its inclusion here makes what is otherwise an abstract tile-placement game a certain depth, and more thematic resonance than a lot of games of this type have.
Finally, the box is striking, and fits the theme really well, and it’s a nice touch that it opens like a book. The use of Greekish lettering is good, and really pops against the background that is designed to look like black marble. The use of Greek letters on the weaver tiles is more for what they suggest of the piece’s function, rather than any connection with the letter itself, or a word that begins with that letter. But they’re well chosen to represent their function, and still add additional Greek flair.
The coloring of the pieces is mostly orange and black, recalling Greek vases. The only disappointing part of the art is the pictures of the leaders, which have very little flavor. But to be fair: the pieces are small enough that there’s really not much room for art—and it’s not like these heroes have any distinguishing physical characteristics to differentiate them from each other (with the exception of Memnon and Penthesilea, whose inclusions help break up the monotony)!
Overall Thoughts:
The first time I played this game, my friend and I tied, and that doesn’t seem like a good sign. The scoring takes a little bit of time to get used to, but otherwise the game is pretty straightforward (though the rules are less clear than they could be).
My favorite two-player games are ones that I want to play multiple times in a row; Agamemnon doesn’t have enough variety and/or strategic depth to make me want to play like that. The designer has tried to address this issue by making the board double-sided, with the other side providing a way to randomize the line types. This gives it some more replayability and prevents it from being completely predictable, but there’s still a pretty small number of set-ups, so even this gets a bit repetitive after a while. This is not a game that you’ll want to play multiple times in a row.
Overall, though, I think the use of theme in this game is pretty cool, and fits with the tile-placement mechanic well. I would give this a higher theme score but the choice of heroes is weird, and so are the numbers on them. It’s an OK, fast game, with some nice choices, and has a place as a quick, two-player filler game, rather than the main event.