Ezra and Nehemiah is a game about rebuilding the temple and the city walls in ancient Jerusalem. There are a lot of things going on around the board, with players playing character cards to give them different actions. There is rubble that needs to be cleared from construction sites, which is later used as resources for rebuilding or for stoking the fire at the altar. There are scribes needed for teaching the torah, picking up other benefits in the process. People need to go to work for 6 days and then rest on the Sabbath, which is when the majority of the points are gained. Making the most of each day is tough because each action has a different number of banners (action points) visible during the turn, but if you're trying to do more than one thing at a time, you need more workers, or more materials, and just getting all of those things to line up is the difficulty. Also, don't forget to collect up enough food so that your people can eat.
A couple days ago I played through the solo game, just to get a good idea of how it all works. Today I played the game against Isaac. He said early on that he felt like he was struggling to keep up with me, but he was actually ahead of me by a couple points at that time. I felt like I was struggling to keep up with him, but I could also see that he was making some good investments on the development tiles. Also, even though he only had one scribe at the end of the game, it was the very one that I had been wanting to get from the top row and I had been building up toward it - the scroll tile that allowed him to use the last card from his hand for scoring. However, looking at the final score, even if I had managed to get that one, he still had a considerable amount of points over what I would have picked up from that same tile.
In the end, he won. Final result: Isaac - 102; Nathaniel - 87. We both enjoyed the game. I definitely hope it will hit the table again more times this year.
