I know Carl Chudyk can design a great game. That’s because he has. Many times. The Glory to Rome black box sells for like a bazillion dollars, and not only because it’s out of print. Innovation has fifty editions, all well deserved. And I still regard Impulse and Red7 as overlooked gems. Not because they’re overlooked, really. Because they don’t get the same attention as those first two I mentioned.

So it’s with no small degree of perplexment that I have struggled to understand Aegean Sea. The bones of a Chudyk game are there. You can line them up to make a proper skeleton. But once assembled, there’s no telling how this dinosaur was meant to function.

Two pleasant Greek isles.

Here’s how I think it was supposed to go.

Like most of Chudyk’s games, Aegean Sea is an idealized Antikythera Mechanism. Every card has about thirty possible uses, like multi-purpose gears that can slot into many places. They are resources called “trade goods,” the object of your expansion, the stuff you produce at far-flung islands and then haul back home. They are also the islands themselves, and the ships that do the hauling, and the manpower that commands the islands, and special actions that break the normal rules, and maybe temples for doing something, and another type of resource that you spend to enact all the other stuff. Oh, also combat resolution and other randomizing elements. Those too. Properly slotted together, they surely fit into something beautiful and elegant.

Except much like the actual Antikythera Mechanism, there’s no telling what any of this is for. It’s either been lost to time and decay or it was never actually functional to begin with.

Oh, the gist isn’t too tough to grasp. Your goal, broadly speaking, is to produce trade goods and ship them to your home island. The more of a good you squirrel away, the more points they’re worth. Holding one dye equals one point. Five marble, though? Twenty-five points. Time to specialize this economy.

Easier said than done. Nothing in Aegean Sea operates the way you’d expect. Even the most straightforward, banal action, like moving a ship from one place to another, is loaded with caveats and footnotes. And that’s before the game decides to slam everybody at the table with a veritable Minoan Eruption. Again and again and again.

Take, for example, your home island. The cards you see on the table constitute the game’s “inner” islands, the contested spaces where troops and ships and temples (I guess) will vie for control of those precious resources. By contrast, your home island is less prone (although not immune) to rival provocation. This is the destination for all those trade goods. It’s also your reference card, and an excessively text-heavy one at that. There are four broad actions in Aegean Sea. I say “broad” because the first of them constitutes five different sub-actions, each dependent on the card you’re spending. Bronze cards place population. Marble cards build temples. Electrum cards produce trade goods. These all come with their own steps and sub-steps, which at this point means we’re piling bullet points beneath our bullet points.

(Greek) wrestling against my hand.

Okay. So far so Chudyk. But your home island is also where you’re instructed to place your quest. Basically, every turn lets you use a card action and use the special ability printed on its face. Okay, fine. Except maybe you can’t or won’t want to conduct this special ability. So you can let it sit around as a quest. Okay, got it. But now it’s sitting there on your reference card. The same reference card under which your home islands manpower, ships, and temples are splayed.

The same reference card that has your faction abilities printed on its reverse side.

Now, a reasonable person might say, “Not a big deal, right? You can place your quest anywhere. And you can flip your reference card to the reverse side when you need to see what your faction does.”

But we’re cutting to the heart of why Aegean Sea has a dysfunctional relationship with its own intentions. Because you pretty much want both references available at all times. Faction abilities aren’t simple things. They aren’t, like, “Move ships faster.” They’re whole paradigms. They’re things like, “Rhodes, when it sails or zephyrs (ugh, that means “teleports”) one of its ships to an island, creates a good there.” That’s one of the easiest examples, and already we’re looking at sub-sub-bullet points, because there’s a substantive difference between this game’s verbs. “Convert,” “change,” and “replace” mean different things, each with their own subtleties. So do “create” and “pay” and “add,” and “sail” and “zephyr,” and hell if I can remember what “recolor” is supposed to mean. Multiple of these verbs mention “placing.” Is that another of the game’s action verbs? I couldn’t tell you.

Again, this is one of the easy abilities. Crete engages in piracy, which might sack whole islands and all of their tucked cards out of the game on a whim. (“Sack” is another action verb. It’s a fancy but limited word for “discard.”) Ephesus can tax and trade, effectively generating victory points with very little effort compared to everyone else. Athens can construct special temples that are worth points at the end of the game. Sparta builds statues praising their toned abdominal muscles. Also worth points at the end of the game. I have yet to see one of them survive more than ten minutes.

The point is that these are all transformative, offering unique paradigms that affect not only how each faction behaves, but how everyone else at the table reacts to them. Fun fact: The word “paradigm” comes from a Greek rhetorical concept that roughly translates into “show side by side.” To put it at its most basic, a paradeigma was an example from which a general rule could be drawn. For example, in the Iliad, when Priam is starving himself due to the grief of losing his son Hector, Achilles brings forth Niobe, who has lost twelve children but is still gathering the strength to eat. By putting two situations side by side, this paradeigma demonstrates the proper course of action.

I’m not bringing this up for funsies. Rather, it’s illustrative, even paradigmatic (oho!) of a larger point. Aegean Sea is a game that bonks you on the head with information. So much information, splayed over and under other tidbits of information, that it swamps together into an indecipherable mess. It doesn’t even have the good graces to make its icons legible. T.L. Simons’ lovely illustrations, sparse as they are, are not the issue. The issue is that there’s only one icon for a trade good, but there are five of the things, and it isn’t always easy to tell at a glance the difference in watermark texture that distinguishes wood from bronze, or marble from electrum. And that’s before we mention that cards have a resource preference, a long-winded term if ever there was one, also printed on them. All of these details matter. Sometimes they matter even when a card has been tucked under another card, forcing you to pick apart multiple layers of information like an archaeologist picking through sediment. Hope you haven’t trimmed your fingernails too recently.

Despite this Gordian Knot of information, Aegean Sea doesn’t even bother to offer its own paradeigma by putting its reference materials side by side. No, it buries them too. It puts its reference materials on the backside of its faction abilities, and then commits the (all too common) sin of not even putting an extra reference on the back of the rulebook. If ever a game needed that extra nudge, this is that game.

Gah!

These user interface failures aren’t even the worst thing about Aegean Sea. Let’s say everyone gets past the five-hundred-foot learning plateau this game has thrown up in front of you. Because, hey, this is Carl Chudyk. We expect plateaus. We expect poor reference materials and repetitive but distinct verbs and icons layered over other icons. We expect cards that stack and tuck and splay until the slightest muscle tremor turns the whole thing into an alphabet soup. (By the way, you know how first player is decided? Everyone places an island from their deck and then assesses which one is earliest in alphabetical order. I guess it’s a better rubric than asking which person at the table is the richest.)

No problem. Or not an insurmountable problem. We expect it.

But the problem is that Aegean Sea is the sort of game where you can know the rules and still have no idea how the play the thing. Not in the sense that it readily produces new challenges, although I’m sure that was the intent. Each faction has a unique deck of cards, all with their own composition and abilities. It’s often the case that you won’t have the right stuff to take basic actions. What do you do when you don’t have any timber to move ships? You occupy your attention elsewhere. Building temples so you can draw a better hand. Stuffing manpower into contested situations to prevent rivals from moving goods. Kicking down the whole tower of blocks.

The kicking is so, so easy. This is bound up in the way all those card abilities function. Abilities are tricky to trigger in Aegean Sea, and cannot be used only in part. If a card says to deploy five ships but you don’t have five extra cards in hand, well, you won’t be deploying four ships or three ships or any ships. This straitjacketing means that putting anything together is a question of multiple steps. You need enough cards, the right cards, the right “suits,” so to speak. More than that, you need the right board situation. Temples built, ships ready to go. Opposing stuff, too. Enemy temples and populace in exactly the right configuration. It isn’t uncommon to believe you’re about to pull off something productive only to discover that, nope, you haven’t met that card’s list of requirements.

On the other side, though, destructive and destabilizing abilities tend to trigger without much effort at all. Sometimes it happens flippantly. Sometimes accidentally. When Ephesus forces a swap of trade goods between home islands, messing with your score and increasing theirs, it feels cheap and dirty, but at least it was deliberate. When Crete conducts a piracy check and an entire island slips into the wine-dark sea as surely as Atlantis, it’s cheap and dirty and wipes the slate of potentially dozens of actions because of a card flip.

Is this a metaphor? Are we meant to become Sisyphus? On a day when the hill is especially slick with guano? The cardplay in Aegean Sea is uncompromising, everything having to come together just so, but the boulder rolls back downhill at the slightest breeze. The result is a game that’s only intermittently functional, and even more rarely intentionally so.

Why are these icons all the same.

What an unpleasant experience. It’s rare that I outright hate a game. In most cases, I even enjoy playing bad or poorly optimized titles. At least I’m spending time doing what I love. At the very worst, we can kvetch about it at the end.

Aegean Sea, though? This isn’t play. It’s emotional labor. It’s one bewildering user interface decision after another. It’s verbiage that direly needed a stern editor. It’s all the fun of playing kickball on the island of Thera in 1600 BCE while the ashes and volcanic gases sweep into the village. I would say let the sea claim it, but some poor turtle would probably choke to death on its waterlogged cardstock. Perhaps a pyre will do.

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