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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Hi, everyone. I’m a recovering Tanga Junkie.
(Hi, Lowell)
Slightly more seriously, while I still order games from Tanga when I see a deal I like, when I first got exposed to Tanga, I went kind of overboard. Sometimes, I got games that I should have never gotten if I had been in my right mind 
That being said, I also ended up getting some games that I would not have gotten otherwise that turned out to be really good, like Oregon or Torres. On a whole, I can’t complain about my relationship with Tanga. (My willpower, on the other hand, that I’m willing to complain about  )
One game that Tanga made super easy to get a hold of a while back was Aquadukt. I think it’s currently out-of-print but Tanga and the now defunct Uberplay were own by the same people so it was real easy to get the Uberplay back stock from Tanga when Uberplay went under. I even got a second copy on a box of Tanga garbage, which I gave to a friend. (He said thank you)
Aquadukt is a noteworthy little game for two reasons. Reason number one, the twenty-sided dice that came in the box looked like it had been run over by a truck. Reason number two, the prosaic and bland exterior hid a surprisingly nasty and vicious game 
The exciting theme of Aquadukt is building villas, sinking wells and digging irrigation ditches. Yes, I know. Your heart skipped a beat when you read that. A villa that has access to water and has your name on the deed will be worth points at the end of the game. A villa without any water, on the other hand, is absolutely worthless.
The board is made up a series of twenty plots that can hold multiple villas, each plot neatly numbered and divided up by potential irrigation ditches. As I mentioned before, on your turn, you have three choices: roll the die up to three times to place villas on the plot whose number you rolled; place a well in an intersection; or lay down two blue sticks to indicate a canal is now a fully operational water supply.
The die roll might look like it would turn the game into a luck-fest but it is not as bad as it looks. You have enough villa tiles and get enough rolls through out the game to even the luck out. What the die really does is add enough randomness to the game to keep it from getting bogged down in analysis paralysis.
And at first glance, Aquadukt looks like a happy little game of infrastructure management. But it’s not. It is a game of methodical resource denial where your goal is dry out your opponents and leave their villas crumbling into dust.
Okay, you have to do your best to build an infrastructure that supports your own needs. That does happen to be true. However, what makes the game really interesting is the ways that you can hurt your opponents, as well as how painful development is going to be.
This is because of three rules:
If a plot becomes completely full, every unsupplied villa is removed from the board and from the game. Is it worth sacrificing a one-point villa to eliminate an opponent’s four-point villa? You bet it is. Every single time. However, if an empty space is supplied with water, you can only place your lowest valued villa down, which means that you need to take a risk to get a four-pointer on the board.
A well can only support two canals and canals can never branch. If an opponent wants to redirect a canal away from your real estate, it can often become very difficult, if not impossible to get that water back on your side. A lot of the sweet, vicious struggle of the game is control of the canals.
Sinking a well takes up your entire move. That makes placing wells a game of chicken. No one want to actually put one out if they can help it since your opponents will get the first chance to lay down the canals from that well. And if your opponents know what’s good for them, they will and they’ll do their best to make sure sinking that well does as little for you as possible.
All that being said, make no mistake that Aquadukt is still a fairly light game. It’s an alternative to TransAmerica, not Tigris and Euphrates. A play of it goes by in a half hour and the decisions you make aren’t heavy. Just evil
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