Designed by: Dirk Liekens
In Sumeria players are jostling for power in ancient Mesopotamia. The board shows a map of Sumer which is broken up into regions. Each region has a city, some towns and villages, and all settlements across the whole board are joined by roads. Your aim is to collect as many influence tokens as you can – and how you do this is down to canny placement and movement of your agents – the little wooden pieces.
Before play begins a card representing each region is laid out beneath the board – you’ll notice that the three on the left-hand side sit neatly under spaces for influence tokens. Influence tokens are drawn randomly from a bag and assigned to these spaces. Then players add a certain amount of merchants to the board before play actually begins proper.
On your turn you can add a merchant, remove a merchant, or move a merchant to the next available space to stop on the road – i.e., passing all the villages and towns occupied by other merchants until you come to an unoccupied one. Crucially, whenever a merchant is added to a region, the cards below the board change position: the region that just received a merchant shuffles one space to the left. Your aim is to have the most merchants in the ‘scoring’ regions (the three on the left) during scoring, which occurs after every third turn. Doing so means you get to pick up influence tokens, which score you points at the games’ end.
After each scoring round the three scoring regions are moved to the right-hand side of the card display – they are now the least potent regions on the board, so piling all your merchants into one spot is a short-term winner but not ideal as a long-term strategy!
At the end of the game the influence tokens score by squaring however many of each colour you have, so a lot of one colour beats a scattering of many. It is a thoughtful game with simple rules.
Low. You're trying to out-think opponents, not out-gun them.
Sumeria may suit players who like a bit of depth and puzzle-solving to their games, and as such it's probably not a go-to game for nippers. Despite the simple rules implementation isn't easy and there can be lengthy pauses.
The world shouldn't grind to a halt but the game will require a bit of thought at time.
Simple rules and can be played in well under an hour.
3-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Weirdly, my boys really like Sumeria, and will play it as well as other more family-like fare such as Lift Off Get Me Off This Planet. Whereas I feel it's kind of dry to the point of aridity - the mechanics are clever, and the game can be explained quickly, but the game feels very abstract and it's possible for someone to have clearly won well before it ends.