Winner of this year's SdJ, Alhambra should be of interest to other designers as an excellent demonstration of how an older, but perfectly decent game, can be revisited and adjusted to suit a different audience.
"Stimmt So" was a stockmarket game, in which shares in various companies were offered at different prices. The trick of the game was that there were essentially four different "currencies" with which you bought the shares, and the twist was that although you could overpay for a share, if you paid exactly the correct price, you essentially got another turn. And at various points there were scoring rounds in which the largest shareholder scored bonuses. This led to some lovely dilemmas as you weighed up whether to grab a share to keep in the points race or to wait until you could pay the correct money in the hope of getting more shares that way.
Now Stimmt So is an interesting game, but I always felt that it lacked that "fun" element: you had almost perfect infomation all the time and there was no feeling of tension in the race for majority shareholdings. And the atmosphere was nowhere, really.
Dirk Henn, the designer, has been revisiting a lot of his designs (I can heartily recommend "Atlantic Star", a reworking of "Showmanager" albeit not quite so dramatically different) but with Alhambra he has managed the unusual trick of adding an entire extra mechanic to an earlier game and yet made it more accessible.
Now, instead of being simply shares, you are buying buildings. Fpr the sake of the theme, they are Moorish palace acoutrements: Seraglios, Gardens, Towers etc.) although they could easily be Italian Rennaissance Princes estates (oh, wait a moment, that's been done, hasn't it? :))
But the buildings have to be placed in a growing estate within a constraining wall and always reachable from a central fountain. This means that not only do you have to take account of the "majority" race, you also have to consider whether, if you buy a particular building, it will actually fit your estate plans.
But the key part of the game: four different currencies, and an extra turn if you pay the exact amount remains the same.
The result is a game in which the atmosphere is much stronger than in the predecessor, there is more to consider when looking at what is on offer, and yet it has a family feel that Stimmt So just didn't achieve.
So what are the lessons Alhambra teaches us? That sometimes a design is not finished even when it is sitting on a shelf to be bought. That sometimes making a game superficially more complex can actually result in a more entertaining experience. And that once your name is known, you can make money by selling the same game twice... ;)
