I’m not really an expansion kind of guy. In general, when given the choice between buying an expansion to a game I already know, or buying a whole new game, I’m going to pick buying a new game almost every time. Yes, I realize expansions are usually cheaper, and there is something lovely about injecting a bit of new into something you and your group are already familiar with, but still. I own very few expansions.

In 2023 I reviewed Akropolis, the tile laying game designed by Jules Messaud and published by Gigamic. I was absolutely smitten with it then, to the point that it landed as number 36 on my top 100 games list, the last time I made that list. Akropolis: Athena is the small box expansion that adds just a few tiles, but can absolutely bend the game if you let it. Let me explain.

Akropolis: Athena basically consists of a deck of goal cards, and a bunch of single hex tiles. That’s right, single hexes. At the start of the game you lay out 4 goal cards, and below each goal card, lay out 4 hexes for a total of 16 single hexes. During the game if you manage to achieve one of the goal cards, you get to take one of the single hexes from that goal card, and place it into your city. You can only achieve each goal once, so you also take a piece of an Athena statue to remind yourself you’ve already completed that objective. If you manage to complete the whole statue, the leftover stone at the end of the game is now worth 5 instead of the usual 1.

What makes Akropolis: Athena special, is that the goal cards are often pulling you in different directions. They offer objectives that by themselves offer no strategic benefit, but those single hex tiles can be game changing. I can’t tell you how often I play a tile laying game, and want to snap a piece in half (looking at you, My Island), or cursing the orientation of a polyomino tile (The Z tile is always facing the wrong direction in My City). Akropolis: Athena gives you the satisfaction of a single hex, allowing it to just drop into the perfect place in your city to make everything feel whole again.

And these single tiles can be really powerful. They may give you stars to improve the score of a certain colour in your city, and many of them are actually split in half, giving you the power of two districts on a single tile. This can allow you to bridge the gap between blue districts while strategically keeping the yellow half away from another yellow tile, or, it can be useless as the spot where you need the tile to go just doesn’t work for the colours that are surrounding it.

Depending on what set of goals you have, it’s entirely possible that no one manages to complete all 4 in a single game. They do ask you to do some odd things, which you often won’t accidentally stumble into doing on your own. Like having a straight line of red tiles, or putting a green tile next to a green star. You might luck into it, but you’ll more than likely need to make a concerted effort to achieve the goals.

The payoff for managing to complete all 4 goals can be almost game breaking. In one of my plays, I managed to complete all 4 objectives, and then hoard 15 pieces of stone for a bonus 75 points. Considering that in the base game, an average score is 114, it’s a pretty lucrative path to take. But if chasing that stone dragon takes up entirely too much of your time, and your opponents’ manage to collect everything they’ve ever wanted, then Athena on her own is unlikely to save your game.

What I’m trying to say is that it is possible to ignore this expansion completely and still come out the victor. Especially if the players overcommit to completing the objectives and don’t properly capitalize on the benefits Athena brings. For some people, if an expansion can be ignored, they ask why have it at all? I have to say that I really appreciate this expansion. Having the goals shift every game keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Now you can’t just rely on hording the green tiles to carry you to victory every single game. Because the Athena tiles do shift the balance of the stars, perhaps in one game the purples just have that little bit higher chance to be even more powerful than the other colours. I also really appreciate having something extra to shoot for, especially when the market is bare and none of the tiles available to be are useful.

Akropolis: Athena hits a pretty great balance between being powerful and exciting, but not overwhelmingly so, in that if you ignore the expansion bits, you have no hope to compete. At the very least it adds variety to the strategy of Akropolis. Athena definitely improves Akropolis, and I feel comfortable in teaching the expansion to new players right from the start. I think my only main complaint is that I can’t fit the expansion into the base box without tossing the entire insert away and just letting everything be loose in there. But even with that gripe, If you enjoy Akropolis and want a small expansion that meaningfully refreshes the puzzle without complicating it, Athena is a must-have.