This week, seven of us were at my house for this week’s session so we split into two groups. Steve, Nige and I opted to play Egizia, a Hans im Gluck release at Essen last year, the Rio Grande version of which I’ve finally given up waiting for.

The game reminds me of Caylus in that you are placing workers on spaces along the River Nile to gain certain benefits. The difference with Caylus is that half the action spaces change every round and once you’ve placed a worker, any later workers must be placed downstream of the earlier ones. The game plays over five rounds and you are trying to gain VPs by building things, searching the tombs or collecting sphinx cards for potential end-game bonuses. Nige managed to grab what we thought was a very powerful card, allowing him to draw two additional cards every time he visited the sphinx. And in our game, the sphinx cards were very important. Once you’ve got them, you really do need to try and fulfil the condition for scoring them, something Steve missed out on with a couple of his cards. On the other hand, I did manage to score a couple of very lucrative cards, although I did need to bank on Steve completing the tomb path for one of them. It ended up pretty close between me and Nige but my sphinxes were just that bit more valuable and I edged a useful win.

Egizia was an excellent game that we all thoroughly enjoyed. It’s definitely in my top three of the year so far. It will be interesting to see how it plays with four players, however, as I suspect competition for the building spaces will be that much more critical.