Weintraub J
United States
Commack
New York
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In the instructions to the Atlantis map, it says that it's very likely that at least one player will go bankrupt. I'd played it previously with three players and found it not particularly challenging, but we'd all agreed that it would clearly be more difficult with six. Last night we tested that theory out, and I can attest to the truth of our expectations.
Atlantis is a tight map for several reasons. First, all of the delivery cities are spread out in a ring around the edge of the map, a good distance both from each other and from the central city of Atlantia, which is almost the only source of goods in the game (every colored city starts with a single cube, and receives no goods growth during the game). Only Atlantia gets growth, with 6 cubes added every turn. That means just one delivery per turn per player in a 6 player game. Production action can help a little - you get two cubes and place them *immediately* on a city, before building or delivering. Of course, the cubes might not be ones you can deliver, or other players may steal them, but hey, that's AoS.
The colored cities are also distributed in an asymmetrical fashion. One one end of the board are the only blue cities (one at each corner). The other end has a double yellow and a double red city, again, one at each corner, but those are islands, requiring $6 ferries plus urbanization to reach at all. The center of the board has the only two purple cities. Urbanization is huge on this map as an action choice.
Finally, the majority of the map is mountains. You can build 4 hexes per turn automatically, but it's very expensive on a map where money and deliveries are scarce. The engineer action, which lets you build for half price, was also highly prized as a result.
Even without a lot of cutthroat competition, mere survival on this map is a struggle. We played it last night, and were almost all well experienced AoS players (we were actually playing an all-day AoS tourney, in fact) and most players were too busy trying to stay alive to hose each other much (there was some screwage, of course). We each just generally carved out our own little piece of the map and tried to make the most of it. Our most experienced player, Chris, only avoided bankruptcy on the last turn by dint of others using his line that turn. He ended the game with an income of zero. Three of the six players had final scores that were negative, and three had also maxed out their 15 shares in just 6 turns. On the last turn, I managed to make one dollar. It was the only positive income made by any player in the entire game. That is a tight map. But we all agreed that it was nevertheless a fun, interesting and well made map.
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