Alhambra Board Game Review
Balance your limited resources and strategic benefits as you build the greatest Arabian palace and fortress in Alhambra. Efficiently spend your cash in 4 different currencies to buy up various building extensions. Use these extensions to grow your Alhambra from around your central fountain. Ensure that your palace is protected by sturdy walls, and dominate your competitors in all the different architectural styles!
Alhambra is a German-style board game or Eurogame, and is an Arabian-themed re-imagining of the stock trading board game Stimmt So! which in turn is a re-imagining of the mafia influence board game Al Capone. Instead of influencing mafia families or buying up profitable stocks, the aim in Alhambra is to control the most powerful, well-rounded and well-defended palace. The premise of the game is based on the fabled Moorish Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain.
Just like the real Alhambra palace, the goal of the game is to create the most inspiring palace/fortress ever, containing many buildings all featuring different styles of architecture. The palace will also need to be properly defended by sturdy walls. The style of the game is primarily a draft game, where both the buildings as well as the currency required to buy them are revealed at random and could be scooped up in an instant.
Players earn scores at 3 different times in the game, which are fairly evenly spread out. At each scoring event, players earn points if their Alhambra contains either the most or second most number of buildings in each of 7 architectural styles. To make things more challenging, each of the 7 building types award different amount of points. So players will need to decide whether they want to fight others in order to get majority in the most valuable building types, or go for the less rewarding types hoping that they won’t face much competition there.
Every round, each player has the option of either buying a building, or taking a currency card. You buy buildings by using 4 different currencies. There is a board with 4 slots, each representing a currency. These slots are filled by building tiles from a bag (like in Scrabble) at the start of each round. While the board slot tells you what currency to use, the building tile itself will tell you how much it costs. So if a 9 cost building tile appears in the yellow currency slot, that tile will cost 9 in the yellow currency.
Other than buying building