As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, I have a big wet one for Days of Wonder games, and I had been wanting Cleopatra and the Society of Architects particularly badly.

Luckily, Tanga decided to run it on the now infinite Tangathon so I snapped it up. Amazingly, on the day it arrived I was able to assemble a quorum of dorks (and Mrs. G) to come out and play.

And… upon explaining the rules, Mrs. G decided to run far far away. I know not why… they are easy:

On each turn, you either:

1) Take one of the three “Market Stalls”

2) Build something from the quarry (that pile of stuff on the right):

To build things, you assemble resources that you acquired from the market stalls on previous turns. For example, to build a Column Wall you need 1 Artisan, 1 Wood, and 1 Stone.

There are two versions of each kind of resource, clean and “corrupted”.

Here are the two versions of the Lapis Lazuli resource. The one on the left is clean, the one on the right is corrupted.

For every corrupted resource you use, you acquire a Corruption Amulet.

Corruption Amulets are immediately deposited in your “Pyramid of Corruption”.

As you build pieces of Cleopatra’s temple, you are awarded Talents.

Each piece has a standard Talent payout, as well as modifiers. For example, when you build a doorway segment, you get an extra talent for each Column Wall connected to that doorway. These modifications force you to think carefully about which segment you build, and where you should place it.

As each type of piece is completed, Cleopatra moves closer to the temple. On the fifth completed type, Cleopatra reaches the door, and the game ends.

At this time, each player’s corruption is revealed and tallied.

The player or players with the most corruption, is fed to Cleopatra’s Crocodile, and immediately loses!

From there, the player with the most Talents is named the winner.

In our game, VitaminZ, who had spent the day bragging about how corrupt he was going to be, was squeaky clean. He made it through several rounds of building without any corruption cost at all. Then, he went on a rampage, getting about 20 corruption in the course of two turns. The rest of us played it cool, not really revealing how much we had collected. In fact, I was totally surprised by each player’s tally.

The only rules problem we had was related to the Column Walls. There are only nine, but the temple looks like it needs eleven to be completed. What we found was that the two spots on each side of the doorways do not, in fact, can not be built. Scoring modifiers start on each side of the temple.

In the end, Marcus had as much corruption as Z, and both were fed to the crocodile, even though they had tons of Talents. (Hee hee hee!) I came next, but was safe.

Unfortunately, sneaky bastard Red 5, had amassed a ton of Talents of his own. and won the game by four or so.

I didn’t mind losing… at least it was fair and square, unlike other sessions that I am still bitter about.

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