Our Review

Consult

das Orakel von Delphi

And climb up into Olympus

Zeus confronts the Mortals with twelve different tasks that they must muster before being able to pay a visit to Olympus. Hercules before them hat to comply with twelve tasks ro be raises to a god. But which Mortal will be worthy and first comply the tasks with which he was confronted?

At long last a game again, in which you must do more than collect most victory points to win the game. The mastering of twelve tasks that are set for each player provides a special allure for the game. Tasks come from four different categories, so to say. In the guise of a mortal from ancient times you must set up Shrines, collect Offering, deliver offerings in Temples, set up Statues and defeat Monsters, for instance the Minotaur or Medusa.

Before the competition about the worthiness to visit Olympus can begin, you must do some preparations. The setting up of the game takes nearly as much time as reading the rules, so a little hint from me – delegate jobs, so that you have enough time to play. Fortunately, the rules come twice, that is, in two languages, German and English.

Due to the variable game board the completed setting-up of the game changes from game to game, but you need to adhere to a few basic rules for the set-up. The rules recommend a set-up for your first game that you are invited to use. In later games, you can then place the board parts in any way you like, there is only one rule to adhere to: There can only be one water area, which must be connected. When the twelve board tiles have been placed, and are connected to the six city parts, the board is complete.

The middle of the board is made up of three parts; each of them is made up from six hexes arranged around a hole. One of those three parts shows only water. You put Zeus in the hole in the middle of this water tile, the hole is the starting place on which you start your adventurous journey as well as the final finish that you want to reach after completing your tasks.

A little information: Gaps that result from random placement of the board tiles, are called Shallows and you cannot navigate in them.

Sacrifices, temples, monster and statues are all available in six colors, one piece per color. All colors for those components are always in play, only their number varies. The number of sacrifices and monsters is determined by the number of players in the game. Sacrifices are distributed evenly on the Sacrifice islands on the plan tiles, no color may appear twice on the same island. Monsters are placed on the monster islands, there are three cases for two monsters each, the rest of the monsters is distributed on the other islands.

There is only one temple for each color, so you put one temple on each of the six temple islands. Statues are placed on the six city tiles of their color; thus, the red city carries the three red statues that must be established on the board over the course of the game. The island tiles showing clouds are shuffled face down and placed on the corresponding cloud cases on the board tiles.

This completes the set-up of the board. But, alas, you are not done with preparations. There is a stack of cards that is used in the game and must be prepared. The stack is separated into Oracle cards, Injury cards, Companion cards and Equipment cards. All those separate stacks, except for the Companion cards, are shuffled and stacked face-down. Six Equipment card are laid out openly and next to them you place the Favor tokens.

The last step in the preparation is the set-up of the individual player boards. Each player receives his own board and his 12 task tiles, which he sorts and puts down next to the top border of his board. He also takes a ship that is placed at the starting case. The shield is placed on case 0 on the track on the board. Each player also receives one god disc for each god and puts it on his board into the bottom row of the gods’ ascension tracks. Finally, each player takes three dice.

The starting player is chosen und receives three Favor tokens, the other players in turn receive one token more than the player before them, respectively - in case of four players, the last one receives six Favor tokens. Then you assign the ship tiles for the player ship to the players and the tiles are placed on their personal boards. Again, the rules suggest a selection of ship tiles for your first game, it is recommended to use them.

The last player of the round receives the Titan die in addition to his three Oracle dice. Then all players roll their three dice and put them on their respective cases on the player boards. This already constitutes the first consultation of the Oracle and determines the course of the first round in the game.

Shrines that players must set up, are placed on the player board. Each player receives a summary card showing all possible actions and draws one Injury card. This card is placed to the left of the player board. Now the competition can begin. The color of my Injury cards determines, which one of my gods I can put into the starting row on the player board, the starting row, on the other hand, is determined by the number of players.

A player turn comprises three phases. At the start of the turn, you check the number of injury cards that you currently own – if you have too many, you must pass your turn. Six different injury card or three injury cards of the same color constitute too many. Then you can discard three injury cards of your choice to reduce the amount. Should you happen to have no injury cards at all, you may either take two Favor tokens for a reward or move one god one step upwards.

In Phase Two of your turn, actions are implemented – you can play them in any order of your choice. For actions, you use the three Oracle dice, and a die that you did use for an action is placed in the middle of the Oracle. If you own Oracle cards, you may also use such a card to do an action, but you always only use one such card per turn. gods, which you manage to move higher on their scales, provide special actions, which you must play as a separate action in your next turn, as soon as the god has reached the Olympus, that is, the top row.

Your turn ends in Phase Three with another consultation of the Oracle. You roll the dice and you must tell the resulting colors to all players. Because the colors you roll enable the other players move their god of the corresponding color one level up, in case the god is already in play, that is, was at least placed into the starting row.

The player with the Titan die rolls this die together with his own Oracle dice when consulting the Oracle. The resulting number od pips on the Titan die determines the number of injuries that the hero must suffer. When the number corresponds to the shield strength of a player or is lower than his shield strength, he need to take an injury card. For all other results, you take an injury card; in case of a six for a result, you must take two injury cards.

Thus, it can happen when you must use the Titan dice, that you must pass your turn or did not have injuries and must suffer some due to the roll. So, keep an eye on your injuries, if you want to avoid having to pass your turn, because having to pass can be quite a setback in the competition, because you lack one complete turn, compared to all other players. Concentration on defense using raise of shield values is surely helpful, but not sufficient on its own.

Actions that you can do during the action phase: There is a selection of three actions that are independent from the color of the Oracle dice, and ten actions hat do depend on the respective colors of the Oracle dice. As you have maximum four actions from the Oracle dice and possibly one Oracle card, you should plan your actions well and tactically. You have enough time for this planning during the turns of the other player, and you must be prepared to change your plans, if the other players set up statues, place sacrifices or fight monsters before it is your turn.

The three actions without color correlation are: Draw an Oracle card from the pile or take two favor tokens or look at two face-down cloud tiles. Those three actions give you certain advantages, the Oracle cards gives you an additional action. The Favor tokens are necessary, if you want to change the color of a dice, and underneath the cloud Tiles the locations are hiding that designate the locations for the Shrines. But don’t forget that executing those actions also takes a die.

Favor tiles can be used bevor you implement actions in relation to dice colors. This is an important point, as the color must correspond to the dice color when you deliver Sacrifices, move the ship, remove injury cards or move a god. Actions that relate to adjacent cases, like fighting a monster, can only be implemented when your own ship is in the respective adjacent case.

The ship is moved up to three cases on the water. A condition for this movement is that it must stop on a case in the color of the chosen Oracle die. When you discard a Favor token, you can move one additional step, the target case must of course also have the color of the chosen die.

As a second action, you can fight a monster. The monster must have the color of the die and the ship must be next to the island case. For fighting the monster, you use the combat die. Each monster begins with a strength of 9. From this value, you deduct your own defense value. You win the skirmish if you rolled the strength of the monster or higher; if you do not have defense, but roll a nine, you have the defeated the monster all the same. IF your roll was too low, you can discard a Favor token and roll again. This discarded Favor token has additional effect – the strength of the monster is reduced by one. So, you can continue the skirmish until you are out of Favor tokens, if you want to.

When the monster has been defeated, you take the monster and put it on your own player board. You have now already mastered one of your twelve tasks and receive a reward. In this case, you may take one of the six equipment cards on display; those cards can be of big help to optimize your turn. So, you should consider your selection carefully. You can receive a total of three equipment cards, as you must defeat a total of three monsters and defeating a monster always gives an equipment card for a reward.

A little hint: In the games we played, the action „Take a Favor token“ was always used more often than the other actions, but you can also get those Favor tokens in some other ways. You need them all the time to achieve an optimum turn, so you should watch your stock all the time.

Another action is to discover/explore an island. The dice color must correspond to the color of the island hex. Your own ship must sit on an adjacent case, if you want to turn over the cloud tile. For this discovery/exploration you receive a reward; if you did uncover a tile with your own color, you can build the Shrine of your color. When you did set up a Shrine, you have mastered yet another one of your twelve tasks and, for the reward that you have earned, you may advance one of your gods by one level.

If you uncover a tile in another color but your own, you receive rewards determined by the letter on the tile. In this way, it can happen, that your own island cases are uncovered by other players. For those situations, there is the action “Build Shrine”. To execute this action, you must sit next to the case and must use the indicated die color; and do not forget to claim the reward for completing the task.

The action of discovering an island has the advantage that you can build a Shrine immediately, but is chance-regulated if you did not look at the tile in a previous turn, because in a game all island tiles are always in play.

Do not forget to make use of the gods, because the special actions provided by the gods can change the course of the game for your own advantage!

One more action is, to load a Sacrifice onto your ship by using the respective die color. A little hint: You can use maximum two storage spots on a ship. One ship in the selection of available ships, however, has four storage spaces to offer. You take the Sacrifice of the appropriate die color and put it on a free space in your own storage. The opposite action to loading a Sacrifice is to deliver a Sacrifice. To do that you must take the Sacrifice to the island with the temple of the appropriate color.

The Action of Loading or Unloading Statues is done in a similar way: You load the Statue on a city case with the corresponding die color onto your ship and then take the statues to a building site in the color corresponding to the color of the statue, using a die of the appropriate color. For constructing a statue, you are rewarded with the Companion of this color – that is, if you constructed a red statue you can select one of the red companions. Possible companions are heroes, creatures and demi-gods. Heroes allow you to increase your shield defense.

At this point, there is an ambiguity in the rules: The Companion card shows that you can advance your shield by two cases, the German rules tell you that you can only advance it by one case. The information in the English rules corresponds to the symbol on the Companion card. It makes a bit difference if you can advance the shield by one step or by two, so this problem should be eliminated in the next edition. I must say, however, that this is the only problem in all the rules.

The remaining two actions are: You can discard all injury cards corresponding to the color of a selected die or that you can advance a god by one step, again in the corresponding color. All actions are very extensively described in the rules, which gives the impression that the game be complex or difficult. But exactly the opposite is the case: In less than a round you have familiarized yourself with the action and can use them to your optimum advantage, the offer lots of options without being unnecessarily complicated.

The game ends as soon as one player has completed all his twelve tasks and arrived back at the location of Zeus. The round is completed and it can therefore happen that you triggered the end of the game but do not win all the same, because another player achieved completing of the task, too, and maybe owns more oracle cards than you. But this does not mar or impede the fun in the game in any way, you only want to play the next game better.

The game is a very tactical one, because the moves of other players have a very great influence on your own next move and therefore a strategy over the course of the game is hard to achieve. You find lots of planning in the game, but this does not mean that it takes a long time to play. To the contrary, it has a nice duration of maximum two hours, a round of experienced players can do it in less time.

The varied board the various actions, which are partly chance-governed, make for an interesting game. What I liked best is the dice mechanism, which on the one hand restricts your action options, but on the other hand demands meticulous optimum planning.

The only, albeit slight, disadvantage of the game is the considerable handling of components when unpacking or storing the game, but this is standard for a game by Stefan Feld. To avoid this I would recommend to pack all components for a player into a bag, so that you only need to hand a bag to a player for the next game.

Isabella Prior

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 100+

Designer: Stefan Feld

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Price: ca. 45 Euro

Publisher: H@ll Games / Pegasus 2016

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Development, dice for actions

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: de en and others

In-game text:

Comments:

Interesting dice mechanisms

Copious components

Lots of interaction

Compares to:

All games with action selection from dice

Other editions:

Fullcap Games, Tasty Minstrel Games and LudoSentinel are announced

My rating: 5

Isabella Prior:

The game is very well plannable and you need to proceed very tactically as a strategy can be very quickly countermanded by other players. The dice mechanisms render the game interesting and diversified.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0