Two players duke it out, well, more than two usually, until someone hits eight or ten victory points, some permanent, some the kind an opponent can strip right back off you. Recruit units, move them, attack, build temples in different colors that unlock different tech, and invest your prayer points across a genuinely interesting spread of choices about which colored temple to prioritize. On paper, lots of moving parts, and my first read was that this one would need several plays before it actually clicked for me.

It did click, eventually, and the maneuvering is more interesting tactically than I expected given how the map is laid out. But the map itself is the part I keep coming back to as a real weakness: everything sits at roughly the same distance from everything else, which kills a lot of the spatial dimension a game like this should be built around. Points are everywhere too, on nearly every action you take, which dilutes the tension of actually earning a big one.

The bigger issue is the endgame dynamic. Whoever’s in the lead gets ganged up on by the table almost automatically, and the losing players end up in a position to hand the win to whoever they like better, which is about as textbook a kingmaking problem as I’ve run into. I’m not the only one who reads this as reminiscent of Cyclades in exactly the way that isn’t a compliment, the same tug of war over the same handful of territories, trading them back and forth turn after turn until someone finally breaks the stalemate.

The first few turns of any given game are genuinely the best part, that sense of actually building something before the endgame maneuvering takes over. After that, it becomes a game I respect more than I enjoy. Worth a look if area control with heavy player interaction is your thing. Not one I reach for often.