This is a game I am not quite qualified to write a serious review about, because I have not properly experienced a full game. Technically I have completed two games, but in both cases our game ended after the first era. A full game can be four eras long, but a victory check is done at the end of every era, so it can end early. I have experienced a full round, but I have not seen how a game can develop in the subsequent eras.

Polis is a game about the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece. In Malaysia the game title can be easily misunderstood because here polis means police. This is a two-player war game, the protagonists being the city states of Athens and Sparta. They want to expand their spheres of influence, by military means and political, to bring other city states under their folds. This is not just a wargame but also an economic game. The people need to eat. If you overextend yourself and fail to feed your people, the city states will rebel and leave. If you do not manage your alliance well and lose all credibility, you immediately lose the game. If you manage to last all four eras, you compare points to see who wins. Points come from prestige and population.

Athens is blue, Sparta is red. The game starts with each side controlling a few city states, those with discs on them. Neutral city states are those black circles with a number. The cubes on the map are your armies and navies. To build an army or navy, you need to spend population as well as resources. You may not reduce the population of any city state to zero. Your population, armies and navies are precious resources. To be able to grow your population, you need to have surplus food. This is something you have to plan carefully for.

The battle mechanism is a little different from typical wargames. There is no traditional sense of who the attacker is. A battle happens when there are eight or more units in a territory. In each era, there is a limit to how many units one side can have in a territory. The limits for the four eras are 3, 4, 5, 5. This means battles will not occur in the first era. There can be at most six units in a territory, three from a side. In the second era, if both players send four units into a territory, a battle will happen. Battles are resolved using die rolls, so there is some luck.

In the game every city state is represented by a little tile. It specifies the basic population, the maximum growth rate, and the population limit. The cubes placed below the tiles are the population at each city state. If you need to build an army or a navy, you will move these cubes to the main game board.

Resource management is something you need to manage meticulously. If you control a territory you can send soldiers there to collect resources. You can do this once per round. Different territories produce different types of resources. If you focus on collecting only one or two types in the same territory, you will be able to collect more. Usually you want to specialise. You need resources to build armies and navies. Some resources are for trading so that you can earn grain (i.e. food) or silver (i.e. money). Some territories do produce grain, but it is often not enough and you need to import. To be able to trade, you need merchant ships. This is yet another thing you have to manage.

Your merchant ships must have an uninterrupted path to the markets you want to trade with. This means none of territories en route are controlled by your opponent. The number of trades a market performs per round is limited. If your opponent beats you to it, you won’t be able to trade even if you have the goods to sell. You will need to wait for the next round.

One important thing that you will do is to projects. These require many resources. You build temples and statues, and you hold festivals, and so on. Projects give you prestige, either at the end of every round, or at the end of the game, or both. Different city states allow different types of projects. Every round only three projects are available. If you want do a particular project, you need to control a city state which allows that project type. This is an important factor as you decide which city states you want to capture. If a city state with a completed project is captured by the opponent, the ownership of the project goes to the opponent as well. Projects change the value of city states and make them tempting targets.

Each player has one diplomat, called a proxenos. You can use your diplomat to outright buy a city state. This is assimilation by political means. It is expensive, but it is a powerful move.

The game looks simple. There aren’t that many game components. However this is not at all a simple wargame. In fact, it has a complex economic layer. You need to manage your resources, plan your trading and feed your people. There is logistics you need to handle. Resources are scarce, and this makes the game challenging. This is all done in a minimalistic manner with little tedium. I would describe this as a compact game.

I played two games against Han. In the first game he forgot about storing food, and quickly lost at the end of the first era because he couldn’t even feed his capital. In our second game, he miscalculated the prestige part of the game, and lost because it dropped to zero. So we have not yet fully experienced all aspects of the game. We haven’t even started going to war. We need to reread the rulebook and try again.

This game feels real to me, because it is not simplistically sending troops out to fight. To be able to afford a war, you need to ensure you have a solid economical foundation. You need to manage your production, your trading, your logistics, and your population. As you grow your alliance, you have to think about sustainability, because you have more mouths to feed. When you decide to invest in prestigious projects, you need to make sure you are able to defend and keep them.