The things people come up with…
I assume the art in most of these games would keep us from
playing them, but they might amuse you to read about.
Kings of Israel is a board game taking place in Israel (the Northern Kingdom) during the reign of its kings up until Israel’s destruction by Assyria. Players are on a team, with each person representing a line of prophets that are trying to remove evil and idols from Israel, while building altars to help guide Israel in the upcoming difficult years. If the players are able to build enough altars before the game ends, they win. If the game ends by either the team running out of sin cubes or idols, or by Assyria destroying Israel, the prophets lose.
A typical round has four phases:
1. King’s Godliness Phase: During this phase, if a bad king is reigning over Israel, the players must draw a Sin & Punishment card, which means bad things occur in Israel because of evil or in response to evil. If during the reign of a good king, the starting player receives a Blessing card.
2. Sin Increases Phase: Location cards are drawn and sin increases at each revealed location. This can possibly cause idols to appear or sin to spread further if sin increases at a location with an idol.
3. Prophets Work Phase: In this phase each prophet gets to use four actions to accomplish their goals. They may use their actions to move, remove sin or idols, draw resource cards, build an altar, make a sacrifice at an altar, or to give resources to another player. A prophets may also play Blessing cards at this time if they have them. In expert mode, after all the prophets take their turn, the false prophet takes his turn.
4. End of Round Phase: The starting player changes to the next player and the timeline token moves down to the next king chronologically. In easy mode, any player who had made a sacrifice that turn then draws a single Blessing card.
The family version of Kings of Israel is available on the game’s website. This version eliminates the King’s Godliness phase, Abilities, and the Blessing cards, which makes for an easier, quicker, and more simplified game.
_________________________________________________
Kingdom of Solomon is a worker-placement game with a few new twists and turns. Do you claim a resource space, an action space or throw in all your remaining pawns to grab a powerful Bonus Space? Will you spend your resources to extend Solomon’s kingdom, take some points in the Market or add to the Temple? These and many other choices await you in this highly interactive game.
You play Kingdom of Solomon in rounds of four phases.
You start the round placing your pawns to get resources, take actions or get a bonus. In this placement phase players take
turns, each placing one pawn at a time. After all pawns have been placed, players resolve what they get from placing their pawns. This is called the resolution phase, and each player, in turn,
resolves the placement of all their pawns before the next player.
Next the players can go to the Market to sell or buy resources. In this market phase, like the placement phase, players alternate
taking turns, except that players take turns in reverse order. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
Finally, you build in the building phase. Players, one at a time, can build a building, roads and add blocks to the Temple.
When you place pawns to take actions, you can get an additional resource for a resource space, trade one resource for another, steal a resource from an opponent, get victory points or draw
Fortune cards. You can play Fortune cards at any time. Fortune cards provide resources, victory points or special actions. Bonuses your pawns can gain for you include one of every resource, three Fortune cards or victory points with a rearrangement of turn order so you become the new first player.
The game ends at the end the round when a player places all his building tokens on building sites, there is a building token on each of the building sites, or the Temple is complete. The player with the most victory points wins.
(Kingdom of Solomon is infamous for its rulebook’s “numerous instances of ambiguity or omission” – additional documentation is necessary to play properly.)
__________________________________________________________
QuestZion (The Game of Israel)
The object of this educational game is to enter Jerusalem and place a ‘Note’ in the Kotel (the Western Wall).
The board is a (disproportionate) map of Israel and is broken up into 7 regions. When a player passes through each of the first 6 regions, they earn the corresponding Activity Diploma that is
required to enter the final Jerusalem region.
Depending on the space that the player lands on, they must either: 1) Answer a question; or, 2) Draw a Yesh/Gevalt card and follow the instructions.
By answering the trivia questions, players learn about Israeli history, Hebrew, Judaism, Jewish heritage, and Jewish traditions.
__________________________________________________
In Nehemiah, players take the role of Israeli leaders who help to rebuild the Jerusalem wall (Ed: see Sefer Nechemiah). The game is based on a unique, worker-placement mechanism:
Players will place their workers on ever-changing labor cards.
When a player activates his worker, he may activate other labor cards in the same row of cards that have already been activated. Doing this will cost him gold, but it may help him utilize his
resources better.
When players are not watchful, the row of labor cards may be changed before they have a chance to use their worker(s), so it’s important to place new workers on good cards, but also to use
the workers already placed.
__________________________________________________
Promised Land: 1250-587 BC is a history of the Promised Land from Joshua through to the Babylonian captivity. Players compete in two teams, out of which just one individual will be
crowned the winner. Hebrew units are split between Northern and Southern kingdoms, but Hebrew players will have the opportunity to use both these factions through the game. Similarly there are eleven Heathen kingdoms for the Heathen players to use. Play happens at an individual, human level as well as at the movement of nations level.
Each player has two Farmers, two Merchants and two Priests. A number of these can be placed after conquest into lands occupied by the kingdom just played. Farmers collect two bronze coins
for plains and one for hills. Merchants collect two silver coins for ports and one for roads. Priests collect two gold coins for temples and one for cities. Players may have only one of their Patriarchs in any one land. Players may share occupation of a land, but only one type of Patriarch may be in each land.
Players use the coins generated by their Patriarchs to buy artefacts that influence game play but can instead choose to secure objectives on the Kingdom track to highlight the development of the nation and score victory points of course!
A variety of strategies are available, and players must
make choices throughout the game in order to emerge victorious.
Listed among the components are:
Canaanites, Philistines, Arameans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Edomites, Ammonites, Midianites, Moabites, Assyrians, Babylonians
Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Saul, David, Solomon, Omri,
Jereboam, Hosheah, Zedekiah (and more)
“The Ark (of the Covenant, not Noah’s)”
__________________________________________________
Package Has Arrived / ????? ?????
A game from 1965 designed by the famous Israeli writer Ephraim Kison, describing the bureaucracy around receiving a package from the Israeli post office in the late ’60. Players roll the dice, advance their markers on the board and follow the instructions while collecting all the necessary documents.
__________________________________________________
A Reign of Missiles is a low-complexity, solitaire simulation game of the Gaza Missile Crisis of November 2012. The player takes on the role of the Israeli military high command as it attempts to fend off the missile strikes launched by Hamas from Gaza.
__________________________________________________
Last but not least, there is, (not making this up) The Settlers of Canaan.
(And that’s leaving out all the wargames based on modern Israeli wars…)