Egizia is a very cute Egypt-setting boardgame. It's one of the ones where the gameboard is just pretty. I played it once in person and a couple of times on yucata.de. I doubt it'll go on being as interesting now I've played it a few times, but I wanted to practice my board-game-review skills in order to see how well I can abstract the most relevant concepts in a game.
The basics
Each of five turns, each player has a supply of three sorts of workers, and of stone, and each turn competes to score points by building at as many as possible of three building sites. Each site has a couple of buildings and each stone in them costs a predetermined amount to place; you can build as many as you have stone and appropriate workers for, and score points equal to the cost.
Each site also has some bonus for building there: the pyramid scores bonus points for building complete rows; the graves score bonus points at the end of the game depending on the total value of tiles you built; the other buildings don't, but at the sphinx, each time you build you get a bonus card which gives you bonuses at the end of the game based on various conditions, some of which involve completing parts of those buildings.
If there's a problem, it's that the points from the sphinx bonus cards typically outweigh the other bonuses, so you have to balance building as much at the sphinx as possible (to get the best bonuses) and elsewhere (to fulfil them) but this is not completely obvious from the first.
Boot placement
In addition to the three building sites, there are Nile spaces that increase your number of workers, or similar and Nile cards that give you stone and grain and ongoing or one-off bonuses like ability to place two boats consecutively.
The twist is, all these are laid out along the Nile, and each player places one boat in turn, which always has to be downstream of their previous boat. So there's a trade-off between travelling slowly and getting the cards you want, whereever they may be, unless someone else gets there first, and rushing ahead to get the most interesting spots before anyone else, at the expense of skipping over several turns.
It's somewhat interesting in 2- and 4-player modes, but somewhat different: in 2 player, running out of boats is more important, whereas in 4-player, getting anything before everyone else snaps it up is more important.
Fields
This is a minor mechanic, but somewhat interesting. Each turn, you need sufficient food to feed your workers (or there's a few cards that let you pay in other ways, or you can pay in varying numbers of points). There are three sorts of fields: green fields, semi-parched fields, and parched fields. Green fields always produce food; parched/semi-parched fields only produce food when the Nile is flooded/semi-flooded. The three states of flood are controlled by the players: there's two spaces that let you move the flood counter up or down. So there's a balance between getting extra-productive parched fields and keeping the flood counter high, or taking smaller green fields and trying to screw everyone else by lowering the flood counter. In the games I've played it's not actually come up much, but it was interesting to think about.