Ramen, Ah!

As of this posting, the margin of victory is still undetermined, but mathematically I can say that I've managed to win my PBEM game of Amun-Re over on SpielByWeb. I must say this is a surprising win - I was expecting 2nd or 3rd place. mHabes came into the second half of the game WAY ahead on money and well within striking distance, and he was my pick to win at that point. He made some interesting moves however, focusing less on pyramids than on other things, and I think that gave me the room to steal the win. The order of auctions helped too, I was able to snag some decent stuff that I might not have been able to had the provinces been auctioned in different order.

It took a little over a month to complete this game. I'd definitely play another PBEM game again, but I think I'd want a commitment to much faster moves next time, there were stretches of days at a time without action. It was also interesting to play with open money...the real game has secret money amounts, but stretched over weeks it is too hard to keep a vague mental count so the developer of the PBEM version wisely chose to keep a count of everyone's cash. I think I prefer the secrecy of the real version, but it was an interesting variant.