Designed by Giannis Iroglidis and Lefteris Iroglidis, with art by Tony Tzanoukakis, Troy is a card game from Alcyon Creative where the two players represent the two conflicting sides (Greece and Troy) in the Trojan War.
The game is played over four rounds of combat. You have four heroes and you play one of them each round. The heroes show the battle points that they add to the four units they line up face down against the units of your opponent. You also choose a reinforcement card for one of your military units but you don't add that to the line up so your opponent won't know which column is being bolstered. Since you know the hero battle points but not the points value of the unit deployed with it, this deployment phase offers much scope for decoy tactics and bluff. Players resolve each column as a separate battle - comparing the total points they have in that column. Once you have the results of each of the battles, the heroes then face off against each other in a duel. They compare their total points (ie: the points they'd previously allocated to three of the four columns) but they add to these their choice of 'support hero' and god. The winner of this conflict is added to the number of wins they had in the column battles and the round is won by the player with the overall majority. The points they win for the round depend on which hero they've defeated.
With its straightforward rules, Troy is an easy-to-play filler-length combat game where you can expect victory to go to the player who is best at anticipating their opponent's placement. It's also about knowing when it's best to concede a battle. For example, if you're 2-1 down after the battle between your units (ie: with one battle column ending in a draw), do you play your lowest value god and support hero cards and effectively concede the hero duel, saving your better cards for a future round, or do you go all in to try to deny your opponent their overall win for the round?
Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype of Troy. Alcyon Creative is bringing this game to Kickstarter in October packaged with two other light Greek-myth themed card games (Argonauts and Deus Ex Machina). Click here to check out the KS campaign.