My boyfriend and I played a 2-player game Faiyum for the first time tonight and are thoroughly impressed by it. I hope to give you some ideas as to how it plays.
Before starting, let me just give a really quick summary of what you do in a game of Faiyum. You have a hand of cards that you play (like Concordia), and you can buy new cards from a market (like Power Grid without the bidding). The third option you have on a turn is to take back cards from your discard pile. You see, Faiyum is a hand building game, instead of a deck building game. All cards you buy go into your hand, and all cards you play go into your discard pile. But when you decide to take cards back from your discard pile, you only get the top three cards for free, so the order in which you play is really important.
With your cards, you're harvesting goods from the Nile delta and building infrastructure like roads and settlements that will earn you points.
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So how did we enjoy it?
First of all, learning the game. I felt the rulebook was quite dense. When reading in the rulebook, the rules for placing your 'harvest' workers and where you can build roads seem very detailed and like a lot to remember. But because these actions are part of your starting hand, they quickly become intuitive. The rest of the rules are fairly simple, and we went over each card as it newly appeared in the market with ease. The glossary is really helpful, and most iconography is intuitive after you've seen one or two similar cards.
Then the mechanics. Let's start with the engine building aspect. I was a bit skeptical in the first few turns, because it felt like I was not building up to anything. We got some resources, built some settlements and roads, but as more cards come out in the market, you get a sense of purpose. You set yourself a goal as to what you're building towards, get those resources and your engine has started.
In the final part of the game, we both got an engine running where we could get quite some points with only a few cards. I had a really cool 4-card mini-engine that got me 13 points, which I managed to play 3 times or so. 629
But since the buildings are limited, those card became meaningless and were left in my discard pile while I was pursuing other goals.
We were reminded of Ora et Labora here. This is a great engine building game where you get your resources, turn them into other stuff, and then into points. The problem we had with Ora however, was that we never got to run a particular engine several times. In Faiyum, it feels like you can. Of course, when a better card is available, you can change gears quickly enough, but you get to play something you built up towards several times and that feels really rewarding.
I also want to mention Copycat, which also gave me the feeling in the second half of the game that something was coming together.
The Concordia-like card playing mechanic, and Power Grid-like market both work very well in this game, but especially the twist in getting cards back from your discard pile, makes it feel like an entirely different game. We both had a different way of managing our hand, my opponent didn't have many cards and picked quite a lot of them up when he was doing administration. I bought a lot of cards, and because I had a card that let me put cards on the bottom of my discard pile, I used cards a few turns and then banished them there. It seems like there are quite some interesting choices to make about how you manage your hand. There's e.g. also a card that let's you remove cards you own from the game, and since your hand size is also important, that will be an interesting card to use too.
The building on the map is really interactive. We were a bit afraid that like Power Grid, this might not be great with 2 players, but we found there was exactly the right amount of interaction. Because all buildings are communal, you have some interesting choices to make. Yes <PERSON>, you can build a lot of towns and gain points by doing so, but if your opponent snatches the right card, they will make even more points from the towns that you just built. It reminded us a lot of Brass, where part of your strategy is also to use each other's roads and resources. We usually don't like a lot of interaction, but the interaction here is really subtle. Your opponent might take away the workers that were adjacent to a part of the map that you wanted to develop. Or block a town with a worker that was really important for you to score a lot of points (kind of like a worker placement game). 366