Game Review: Valley of the Pharoahs

Can’t take it…must blog…no time…

Wow.  Not linking to Amazon is sometimes a pain in the ass.  Anyway, a link to the game is here.

Ray got Valley of the Pharaohs from Dave and Margie and Katherine for Christmas this year, and we finally sat down and played the game recently.

It’s a delightful exercise in deliberately screwing people over, for 2-6 players and from 8 on up, in a coolio box, with genuine die-cast camels and mummy.  The cloth “board” makes it a little hard to play on the carpet but is otherwise fun to play on.

The general idea is, you’re an archaeologist in the late 1800s; you take your camel and go racing after one of three random scarabs that make up your key to the staff of Amun Ra, while avoiding both other players and the dreaded mummy.  Once you have the staff, you get it back to Alexandria double-quick before someone else takes it away from you.  Meanwhile, you’re sabotaging other players and desperately trying to scrape together the resources to dig up the scarabs.  In fact, sometimes the only way to get the money is to sabotage the other players.

Ray and I played a couple of games one day, then dragged Lee in to play a day or two after that.  Ray and I both took one of the early games; Lee took the last one, because Ray was so intent on getting revenge for things I’d done in the previous game that she didn’t notice that Lee had the staff and was on the home stretch.  I, of course, was broke.  I’ll get her next time, don’t you worry.


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