The Great Commission
- Michael Harrowing
- Oct 8
- 3 min read
The Great Commission, designed by Paul Snuggs and Simon Amadeus Pilario, and published by Word for Word Bible Comic, is a taxing and testing cooperative game of success and survival with an impressive and immersive dedication to Biblical accuracy.
Tho' we had not previously encountered the publisher’s mainstay of graphic novels, it is immediately clear that they have successfully carried over their core skill sets of powerful illustrations (from Simon Amadeus Pilario) and Biblical accuracy into the gaming format. Those that are familiar with the New Testament text will find an exceptional selection of recognisable names and places, concepts and events, that combine to form an immersive experience that captures the very real difficulties faced by the early Christian Church. In this way, The Great Commission will find a natural fanbase in those with a Biblical interest. The 'Good News' for everyone else is that the gameplay also stand on its own merit as accessible and enjoyable to all, regardless of familiarity with Christianity; religiously or historically.
Each player takes on the role of a 1st century Church leader, seeking to evangelise the known world whilst managing their own congregation of young converts through ‘prayer’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘discernment’ - and players may literally have to resort to that to succeed! Over the course of seven rounds, each Church of a starting six people must contend with unpredictable ‘bad’ and ‘good’ events before performing just two actions to deal with internal troubles and the game-winning goal of ‘Outreach’. All members of your Church have their unique talents (and Bible references justifying their place in the game) which they can contribute before exhausting themselves and becoming in need of recovery and recommissioning. Along the way, the ‘Spiritual Health’ of the Church must be maintained, with ‘prayer’ and ‘blessings’ from God.
With 12 double-sided real-world locations and 15 named Leaders (each directly named in the Book of Acts), there is a high degree of asymmetric variety and replayability built into setup; and that is even before players start recruiting from the deck of 60-70 other unique ‘people’ cards and face the 50 potential ‘Troubles’. Through all this variation, the central goal of working together as churches to ‘Outreach’ to potential new members in the World deck always remains the same, prompting strong thinking, tactics and collaboration from everyone around the table.
Initially the process of each round is not intuitive, which can slow the pace a little, but players should expect most of their 1-2 hour game to be taken up with the difficult decisions of whom to send and whom to save in response to the Trouble besetting your churches. Indeed the ‘Bad event’ and Trouble cards present a very difficult challenge – to the point where I question if the game is no so much strategic as barely managing to keep up with the relentless events conspiring against your success! That said, there are set up recommendations for an easier game, and of course one hopes that practice will make perfect. And some readers will absolutely relish the high level of challenge presented.
The immersive aspect of this game is impressive, especially given the content is entirely cards. The designers have clearly put a lot of thought into the game experience to ensure fidelity to the source material and thematic clarity. Church leaders must consider how much prayer to place on an event, and balance that with assessing how much ‘resistance’ their members might face in the world. Even the box is designed so that, end on, it echoes the appearance of an actual bible to reflect the world that players are getting into!
It should be noted that the dedication to historicity results in a mature content warning. With some card illustrations depicting beheading and flogging, the game recommends a 14+ age rating, and players looking for a lighter experience may wish to remove those cards from play, which you can do without unduly affecting gameplay.
Personally, this game experience has given me a new appreciation of the tough challenges that the early Church faced. From my lack of success, I can confidently assure you that the world would be a very different place today if I’d been an early Church leader! This is a feat that few other games achieve within their respective themes - testament (no pun intended) to the thematic strength of the game, especially in its attempts to be historically reflective of the circumstances.
Word for Word Bible Comic are crowdfunding The Great Commission. Click here to find out more...
(Review by Michael Harrowing)
