Games That Don't Suck: Alhambra

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Alhambra, the name given to the 14th-century palace of the sultans of Grenada, is also one of the best tile-laying games available. It is additionally the name of a brand of beer, which is nearly enough to justify for it an entry in this series.

In Alhambra, each player constructs his or her own version of the famous Grenadan palace, using square tiles representing the complex's various features – gardens, arcades, towers, and so forth. Each tile has a purchase cost and a color that determines its value in victory points. Some also have thick black lines, or walls, that may increase the tile's final point value but also make it harder to place in one's palace. One acquires palace tiles by purchasing them from a small mat, the “market,” with four stalls, each identified with to a particular color (ostensibly the nationality of that tile's builders, but that isn't important). Each tile can only be purchased with currency of the color corresponding to its market stall. Players can overpay for a particular tile, but if they pay its exact value they get an extra action. Managing one's money, which all players obtain from a common pool, is one of several tasks players of Alhambra must undertake while playing.

On his or her turn, each player may draw money cards from the bank – at least one card, and more than one if their total value is 5 or less – buy a palace tile from the appropriate market stall, or redesign their palace. “Redesigning” sounds complicated, but isn't; when a player buys a tile, he or she must either add it immediately to their palace, or place it in their “reserve,” where it earns no points. Players with reserve tiles can then add them to their palace, or swap them for existing palace tiles, as a redesign action.

Adding tiles to one's palace is the most important part of the game, since it determines how many victory points one scores. Players must position their newly-added palace tiles orthogonally to existing palace tiles – that is, the new tile must share at least one side with an old tile. (Players each start with one 0-point tile, the Fountain of the Lions, already in play.) Some palace tiles have walls on one or more of their sides; these inhibit palace construction but can also score extra points for the player. In placing a tile with a wall, a player must be able to trace an orthogonal line from the new tile to an old tile that is not blocked by a wall. (The rulebook explains that a “visitor” to your Alhambra must be able to walk from tile to tile without going outside or running into a wall.) Walls make building more challenging, but players do earn points for their longest continuous wall at the end of the game.

The game begins with two scoring cards sorted into the money-card deck (the deck from which the bank is replenished); when each of them turns up, players initiate the first and second scoring rounds. The third scoring round occurs when there are insufficient unpurchased palace tiles to replenish the tile market – that's also the end of the game. In each scoring round players earn points determined by 1) the different colors of tiles they have in their palace, and, more importantly 2) whether they have more of that color in play than anyone else. In scoring round 1, the player with the most tiles of a particular color earns points for it; in round 2, both the player with the most and the player with the second-most tiles of a given color earn points (more for the first-place winner), and at game's end points are given to the top three tile-builders of each particular color. The players congratulate the person with the most overall points, drink a pint or two of Alhambra beer, and then wait for Ferdinand and Isabella to show up and demand their surrender.

Like Dominion, Alhambra is a simple game with a little luck (the money cards and tiles appear randomly, though in large enough groups to permit choice) and a lot of decision-making. There are money-management decisions: players need to choose which currency cards to take from the bank and whether to save up low-denomination money for exact purchases or spend what they have before other players buy the tiles they want. They must make design decisions: should they maximize the interior area of their palace or focus on building the longest walls? They must also keep track of the architectural “horse-race” between players, who are competing to have the most tiles of each particular color, particularly the more valuable colors, in their Alhambra. If the game has a flaw, it lies in the thinness of its “skin:” while Alhambra is allegedly set in 14th-century Spain, there is very little about the game's mechanics that is reminiscent of that setting (and the artwork, while pretty, is somewhat abstract). If you want a game to carry you away to a different time or place, like Middle Earth or the European Theater of World War Two (or the Middle-Earth Theater of WWII), this isn't the best choice. Otherwise, though, this is a quick, easy-to-learn game with a lot of depth, and a good introduction to a game mechanic (tile-building) with which most people are unfamiliar.

Illustrations, top to bottom: a sample game of Alhambra, courtesy of Martin Sommerfeld; extreme close-up of an 8-point green tile; recommended post-game refreshment.