I want to like this more than I do, and I think that’s the most honest way to open. You play an Egyptian god trying to become the one true god, gathering followers, building and holding monuments, and fighting non-random, streamlined battles across the map. The production is stunning, genuinely, the kind of table presence that gets a “whoa” out of people walking by even before anyone’s played a turn.

The trouble is the map itself. Everything reads as roughly the same distance from everything else, which flattens whatever spatial tension a map like this should generate, and once you notice that it’s hard to unsee. Points show up everywhere too, on nearly every action, which dilutes the tension of actually earning them. And the endgame dynamic, everyone ganging up on the leader, some inevitable king-making by whoever’s mathematically out of it, is a real design cost I can’t talk myself out of.

I’ve played this with three different groups now, and the reaction has landed somewhere around “fine, nothing special” every single time, myself included, even after painting the minis up properly, which normally buys a game a lot of goodwill from me. It’s Lang’s third game in this loose trilogy and it still reads as “good but not great” to me, a whirlpool of keywords and abilities and expansion add ons that mostly exist to make you feel like you’re missing something if you play base.

If dudes-on-a-map is your genre, Lords of Hellas and Blood Rage both do more for me than this does, and I don’t see a situation where I’d reach for Ankh over either one. The miniatures alone almost justify keeping it on the shelf. The actual play experience doesn’t quite earn its reputation.