King Tut!

Our next game on November 28th was a 5-player version of Tutankhamen. Manny, Cathy, Jake, Chris, and Charles played.

The game takes a little while to set up -- you have to make a meandering path to a pyramid. While we placed tiles, Charles went to buy some food. Manny and Charles had never played the game before so we had to explain it to them. We had to do it twice, since Charles was fetching food.

Once the path is laid out, each person takes a turn moving his/her pawn along it. You don't roll dice or anything, you just move as far along the path as you want. You take the artifact tile on which you land.

You are trying to make sets of tiles, some tiles are in sets of 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8. Whomever holds to MOST of a set when it is fully collected gets to give away gold pieces equal to the number of tiles in the set. Whomever holds the second most gets to relieve herself of half that value. You are trying to be the first to give away all your gold.

With 5 players, you each start with 16 gold pieces.

The game went like this...

Manny completed the first set with a scarab (value=1).
Manny and Jake then split a set of cats (value=2), so they each got rid of 1.
Manny completed another scarab set (value=1).
Cathy completed a set of cats by herself (value=2).
Jake completed a set of Jackals (value=6). Chris had a couple and got to toss in 3.
Charles and Manny split Jackals (value=6), so they each got throw in 3.
Charles (I think it was Charles) bought a Burial Mask from Jake, so Jake got to get rid of a coin.
Cathy grabbed the last Green Burial Mask. She had 3, Jake had 2, Charles had 2, Manny had 1. It looked like she won that outright -- but Jake had 2 wild cards that he applied to the set -- he then had 4 making HIM win outright -- he got to toss in his last 8 coins, winning the game.

Here's how we ended up:

Tutankhamen final results
player	coins left
Jake	0 (winner!)
Manny	7
Cathy	8
Charles	13
Chris	13

Nifty game. Clever strategies.