Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia

In Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia, from Archwood Games, the 1-4 players play as Greek gods collecting resources and utilising them to transform the landscape. The 4 x 4 board starts off as a barren desert but over the course of the game the squares will be transformed into grasslands, rivers and mountains. You score for being the player who locks in any terrain but you also score for each square of terrain that matches your god's divine plan (the concealed card you are dealt at the start of the game). Along the way, players will be recruiting demigods. These also contribute to scoring but their main use in game is to add to the effectiveness of the action column into which the demigod is placed.

Trevor Kerth's design is of a game of tactical manipulation with players moving their gods and placing out and shifting resource tokens in adjacent squares to terraform the world to match their own plan. Resources are tight, however. Each turn you routinely collect two at random (determined by the roll of a custom six-sided die) but you need them not just to jostle for control of landscape squares and eventually to lock in terrain but also to pay to recruit demigods. You can find another god has locked a terrain that matches the requirements of your god's plan so this is a game where the winner won't necessarily be apparent ahead of the final reveal (when all the squares on the board have terrain locked in).

There's a distinct arc to Pantheum. The game starts off slow and tentative but it ramps up in tempo as players recruit demigods and use their powers to create an increasingly strong engine. It can be especially effective when you have demigod powers that let you take an action in a column that's normally associated with the power of a different column. Just be warned tho' that in end-game scoring for demigod cards you only score the points value of the strongest demigod in each column; in our plays at Board's Eye View some players grumbled that they felt shortchanged because they got only 2 points for a column that had demigods in it whose individual points totted up to 8 or 9 points. With resources dependent on the roll of a die, there's inevitably a luck factor that can be frustrating if you need a particular colour of resource. If the die rolling bothers you, however, you might try house ruling that players can simply choose any two different colour resources.

We've particularly enjoyed Pantheum as a two-player tussle between rival gods. The game is highly interactive as players second guess each other's divine plans and try to capitalise on or sabotage them, and it can be played in around 45 minutes.

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