Obelus
- Board's Eye View
- 51 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Obelus is a small-box two-player abstract strategy game designed by Chris Williams and published by Phase Shift Games. It's played using obelisk shaped four-sided dice but it's really not a dice chucking game. You can play it in 'Chaos' mode, where you initially roll your four obelisk dice but in 'Pure' mode there's no dice rolling at all; you always select the die face you want to use.
The game is played in a circular grid of eight shiny obelisk-shaped cards. The game also comes with eight 'rift token' counters and one of these begins the game placed on one of the cards. Players each have four four-sided obelisk dice which all start off in the centre of the card circle. On your turn you must either 'summon' one of your dice by taking it from the centre and placing it on a card that has no die or token on it, or you can 'shift' one of your dice by moving it clockwise or counterclockwise the precise number of places shown on the die but you must change the number at the end of your move. When you shift a die you can jump move over cards bearing your own dice but you cannot land on a card with one of your own dice already on it. You cannot move over cards that have your opponent's dice on them but you can land on a card occupied by an opponent's die. When you do, you 'banish' their die. It's out of play unless and until the player summons or shifts a die to that location to 'reform' it (bring it back into play in the centre of the circle where it is again available for summoning). When a die is reformed, you place out another rift token at that location. The rift tokens don't affect shifting, banishing or reforming but they inhibit summoning: you can never summon a die to a location with a rift token on it.
There are special rules about obelisks with the number 4, in that each player can only ever have one 4 in play and your obelisk dice value 4 can only be banished by an opponent's die value 4, but otherwise that's pretty much the rules in a nutshell. The objective is to be the last player with a legal move available to them (ie: you win if your opponent is unable to take either a summon or shift action on their turn).
Obelus then is a game where you're trying to ensure you are preserving your options for future actions while blocking the options for your opponent. You are using the dice primarily as markers rather than random number generators, so this is a game of tactical skill rather than luck. Even in 'Chaos' mode, where the starting number for each die is randomly rolled, you still get to choose the number on each obelisk die after every shift action, and of course in 'Pure' mode there's no element of luck in the game at all.
Obelus plays in a brisk 10-15 minutes, so it makes for a great easy-to-play filler. But, be warned, it's fiendishly addictive: every time we've introduced it to a new player, they've lost their first game but immediately wanted to play a re-match.