The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.
Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.
In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.
Thebes: What Is It?
Thebes is a press-your-luck set collection game featuring rondel-style movement mechanics for 2-4 players. In the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or any board game that features “competitive archaeology”, players take on the role of knowledge seekers trekking the world to conduct research then dig up valuable artifacts that can later be displayed in some of the world’s most prominent museums.
Or something.
On a turn, players take time to move around the board, with spaces representing major European cities and valuable dig sites in other locations (think Egypt or Palestine). When a player goes to a European location, they can conduct research by taking cards from a market that match the location where their large Indiana Jones-like meeple is standing. Each research card has either a number of book icons (more is better), or special powers, like cards that represent wild research icons, boost the amount of treasure that can be kept during a dig action or better ways to traverse the map.
If players go to a dig location, they spend not only the time it takes to move to that location—all locations are connected by a series of lines that represent travel routes—but then they use a small wheel to determine how many tiles they can keep from a draw bag matching the location where a player’s personal Indy token is standing. More research icons matching the location on their research cards means more pulls that can be done from the bag. Each bag has 16 artifact tokens (a mix of artifacts and tokens that boost research in a different city’s color) and 17 “sand” tokens. A player draws tokens up to their draw limit, with sand tokens going back into the bag after a player finishes drawing…making future draw actions quite precarious for other players, based on what was drawn previously.
The board’s track around the board equals 52 spaces…each representing a week of traveling the globe. Similar to other rondel-style movement games, the player who is furthest behind on time spent is the active player, and each game round represents one year. After three years, players total up their points based on artifacts drawn, set collection tied to one of the research card types in the market, majorities based on who is the smartest archeologist in each of the game’s five colors, and exposition cards scored by each player who had the matching research tokens when those cards reached the board.
Raiders Was Better
At times, Thebes is great…which, during my single three-player game, was during the game’s second round.
That’s because it is clear that Thebes will almost always play out the same way. It’s best to spend most of your first year gathering as much research as you can, because that way you can draw more tiles from each dig site’s draw bag when you visit. (You can only visit each dig site once per year.) Having 6-8 research icons, at a minimum, is the best way to go, so I was laughing as I visited some sites early in the game’s first year with only 1-2 pulls from the draw bag. This is further incentivized by the time mechanic—it costs a lot of time to get more pulls from the bags with lower research icon totals, so I was doubly upset with myself for bothering to go to each site early.
The second year was the meat of our game, and that was a blast to draw tokens in the hopes of finding the best treasure in the lot. The game comes with cards that show all players the value and quantity of each token type in each bag. Unfortunately, that also means a player knows that when the 4-5 best treasures have been claimed from a location, there’s no real reason to go back to grab any other tokens later.
The third and final round of Thebes is really a bust. By the halfway point of that round, most treasure bags are devoid of anything juicy, and players find themselves with little, if anything, to do as they make their way around the board to wrap up the game. That left our game feeling really dry by the end…save for pushing an area majority in book icons, Thebes feels like a game that didn’t know what to do with itself to wrap up its proceedings.
That left Thebes in a pretty straightforward place. It was fun to give Thebes a spin, but repeat plays will yield similar fruit. It was fun to give this a look, but its middling gameplay means it might be best left at a dig site outside the Temple of Ra!
