Havocville
- Board's Eye View
- Sep 9
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 11
'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.'
We don't know whether Fabricio Leotti and Tulio Ornelas had this line from Shakespeare's King Lear in mind when they designed Havocville but it would be an apt strapline for the game. That's because, in Havocville, from Dice Coalition, the 2-5 players are gods competing for dominance, and with little regard for the welfare of the mere mortals at their disposal. There are factions of people, distinguished by colour (of their cards, not skin), but none of the gods are identified with any specific faction; which faction you happen to favour will depend on the requirements of the dominance cards you happen to draw.
The game is played over three eras, comprising a total of 7 turns per player, taking one 'creation' and one 'transformation' action on each turn. Creation actions add land or people tiles to the Havocville city. The tiles you lay may give you bonus cards and tokens, depending on adjacency and what's shown on custom six-sided reward dice. Transformation actions let you draw chaos cards (giving you a choice between two effects) or manipulate the tiles already on the board. However, other players can challenge you and will steal your transformation action if they win the challenge. If a god is challenged by another, they each play a people card face down as their champion; the challenger must also place a power token. The competing gods each then conceal in one hand the number of power tokens they are committing to the challenge. The tokens and the champion cards are simultaneously revealed, and it's the winner of the challenge who gets to take the action; the power tokens get added to tiles on the board but the champion cards are all discarded - after all, to the gods mere mortals are disposable. If there are ever two tokens on a tile, it is flipped to its 'cursed' side, where it loses its faction colour and won't count for scoring. A god will need to 'bless' the tile by removing all its power tokens in order to restore it.
All the creation, transformation, challenge, chaos and cursing is aimed at manipulating the tiles in the shared tableau so that they satisfy the requirements of your dominance cards, with cards scoring at the end of an era but carrying forward to the next era where they can score again. Dominance cards start off face down, so this is a game where you'll need to try to deduce your opponent's objectives, and maybe bluff to mislead other players. Of course, any of your dominance cards carried forward to the next era will be known to the other players so you can expect them to do their damnedest to frustrate you from scoring with them again.
Do you feel like a god or get a sense of the numinous when playing Havocville? Probably not; tho' if you are a player who likes to get fully immersed in a game's theme, you've a juicy role to play here: you might want to rehearse orating in an intimidating Brian Blessed boom. Beneath the theme, however, Havocville is a neat abstract strategy game that mixes puzzle optimisation with bluff and deduction. And, theme notwithstanding, no pantheons were offended or insulted in the production or playing of this game.
Dice Coalition are due to release Havocville next month at Spiel Essen 2025.
