Publisher: AEG
Designer: Brent Keith
Artists: Nate Barnes, Gonzalo Ordoñez, and Rodney Saenz
Year: 2010
Genre: Deity focused trick taking game
Players: Three to six players
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 45 Minutes (Ha!)
MSRP: $34.95
My first attempt to play this game was thwarted by the rulebook. It is fairly small, and so I believed the game could not be too complicated, and yet after several reads I was unable to comprehend the rules. Reluctant to give up, I read and watched several reviews, went through the questions listed on BGG, and it all started to come together.
We finally sat down to a three player game. In essence it is a trick taking game. Here are a few tips to translate the rules into layman’s terms:
Ruling Domain = Trump Suit
Leading Domain = Leading Suit
War, Harvest, Death, Weather, Heavens = The five suits, these make up the Mortal deck
Epoch = Full round of play, there are 3 epochs in a full game
Challenge = A Trick
Divine Act = when you get to take a special action after a challenge claims a city
City = What you claim after winning a certain number of tricks
The sequence of play is generally:
1 ) Flip over a new city from the city deck, the large center number on it represents the number of tricks you need to win to claim the city.
2 ) At the beginning of each epoch, flip over a mortal card to reveal the trump suit.
3 ) The player who won the last trick plays a new leading card, determining the leading suit.
4 ) The other players each play a card
5 ) The winner of the trick is determined according to the regular rules for Spades
6 ) The winner claims the city, and a number of harvest tokens representing the population number printed on the city card, if they have won enough tricks
7 ) The winner takes a divine act, and the other players can as well if they played a card allowing it.
8 ) The other players take a token matching the suit they played
9 ) The next city is flipped over, or the next leading suit is played by the winner of the trick if the city was not claimed
10 ) Play continues until one player runs out of mortal cards, then when the current city is claimed the epoch is over.
11 ) After the 3rd epoch the game is over, count the population (Harvest Tokens) on your city cards, the one with the most population wins the game.
It was a lot of fun, but pretty confusing, there are special cards for each deity, each token can do special things, most cities have special powers, and many cards that you play also do special things. Keeping track of all this is not easy, and will require several sessions of play to get the hang of it. Plus there is a lot of ambiguity in the rules that require a trip to boardgamegeek to get clarifications.
I recommend this game for gamers. For Grandma or the kiddies it might be a little much, like teaching them Agricola. Plus you can get hurt feelings by wiping out a city that another player spent a lot of effort in claiming. It is a lot easier to wipe out a city than to claim it.
So to sum it up, it is a good game with some production issues that really detract from the game. Once you get past those, you can have a great time, there is a lot of strategy hidden in there.
Here are a few tips that took me a while to figure out:
You can only use 1 war token on a played card to give it a +3, you can’t use 2 to give it +6 and so on.
You turn over a new trump suit at the beginning of each epoch, or when a player uses a card or token to change it, NOT every time a new city is turned over.
There is a large, revised version of the player reference sheets on Boardgamegeek. I was unable to read the ones included with the game, as the font was smaller than my eyes could ever hope to see.
Try coloring the tokens the correct color on the face with a highlighter or something like that. It makes it a lot easier to find the correct tokens, as they are all so similar.
The cards that say “Get an Extra divine act” mean that if you won the trick you get two divine acts, if you didn’t win, you get one divine act.
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