Hellas

 Unusual boardgame last night ( I seem to playing more boardgames than anything else at the moment).  This was Hellas, a boardgame dating back to 2002.  It's a small, interesting game from Kosmos and Rio Grande games and seems to be part of a range of similar sized games which I need to go and explore.

It's a game of 2 Greek states expanding their empires and inevitably clashing over islands and land somewhere in the Aegean.   Visually it reminded me a lot of games like Carcassone (without the meeples) with players laying hex tiles around a central hex decorated with a dolphin.  Each of these features an island or land with a town and, sometimes, a temple.  Each player places a soldier in the towns to indicate they are controlled. Once a few tiles are down the serious business of expansion begins.  In each turn players have 3 options:

Voyage and add a new tile.  Placement needs to conform to certain rules so isn't always possible although I think we were always able to place one somewhere... just not necessarily in the place we would have wanted to put it. You also have to spend one ship to carry out a voyage and the ship is lost regardless of whether the tile can be placed or not.  The aim is to control 10 towns so this is a key way to win, but of course it does mean that players are likely to do action #2 which is...

Attack.  It's fairly easy to steal a town off your opponent... you only need to equal the garrison, or have 1 more if attacking by sea.  You have to leave at least 1 soldier to defend each town and they can only hold a maximum of 3 so it means attacking a town is likely to leave another one of yours vulnerable and there were several rounds of cat and mouse as each of us would build up our armies and force the other player into an arms race before launching an attack.

The 3rd action is called 'Burst of Strength' and this is effectively reinforcing with troops and ships and/or drawing a God card.  There are 3 decks to choose from: Ares, who is good for attacking, Poseidon, who helps with voyages, and Zeus who seems to be a bit of a general all-rounder.  The cards allow special actions, or let you cancel an opponents card which stymied both of us at points.

Playwise it's quite a tactical head scratcher.  It's easy to capture one of your opponents cities, but much harder to do so without leaving yourself exposed to them doing the same next turn.  The cards add a nice random element but don't feel overpowering.  The game itself only took about an hour or so to play and would be an ideal travel game as the tiles don't take up a huge amount of table space.  Defintely need to have a look at the other games by this company