And here we are again, this time we played the same game as last time, the very good Magna Grecia. We all started normally, with Nelson claiming ownership of an oracle in the first turns.

Here´s Nelson getting the attention of the oracle.

Artur´s city gets expanded in his turn.

So the game went on without much trouble in the first turns. I (orange) managed to get the attention of an oracle and started to collect connections for one of my cities, Rui doing the same. Artur kept expanding his city, and that led us to an oversight of the rules. You can´t build cities adjacent to villages unless you plan to build on the same turn a city in that same village. We missed that rule, but we found about it soon enough and didn´t affect much our game.

Artur´s city (yellow) getting bigger and bigger. Note that the city is adjacent to a village. That shouldn´t be.

As the game progressed we started to connect on opponent´s cities, giving points to both of us. Nelson (brown) was quite literally splitting the map in half as he progressed from the north to the south, giving Rui (red) no other chance but to connect to one of Nelson´s cities and continue from that. Since you can found a city as long as it is connected to one of your roads, that's what Rui did by linking a road to one of Nelson´s cities and founding a city from that road.

The game at its middle phase.

At this point of the game we started to build markets on other cities than our own. This is crucial if you want to win at this game but you must build markets with care, since they may be built and not be active. Only active markets score, so it´s crucial we make sure that the market is active. I built some markets, but one of them wasn´t active, so I had to found a city north and connect it to one of the cities that had my market. Everyone started to build markets everywhere, and paying up the cost of the market in points.

The game starts to get crowded. Note that many cities have now 2 markets.

So the game kept going without much surprises till the end. Everyone was happy to connect to their opponent´s cities. At the end, my road supply was gone.

The game at its end. It was fun.

The final scores were:

Nelson - 48
Rui - 46
Artur - 41
Joao - 34

Curses! I came out as last. Again.

Anyway, this is a great game. A bit abstract and dry, but quite fun nonetheless. I recommend it.