Sumera

This abstract includes 120 wooden squares, twelve wooden houses and thirty-two human figures in four colors for a game which is simultaneously about competition and cooperation. At the start there is a deserted, connected and fruitful land. You begin on a square of your choice and expand your territory by building on top of foreign tiles, skilfully placing your people, making useful marriages and attacking figures that get in your way. The victory formula is the number of tiles (of your colour) that are connected to your huts plus the number of your unmarried people on the board, all multiplied by the number of marriages you have concluded. Your aim is therefore to own a large territory and to make as many marriages as possible. If you do this better than the others, you become the monarch of Sumera. Credits state: "With ideas from Frank Schaubrenner, Meersburg. An earlier version,The Walls of Babylon, contained a mechanism related to that of Wolfgang Kramer's Burgenland/Terra Turrium, and was shown in Göttingen in 1987 and published by Witt Spiele at Essen in 1989."