The Italian publisher Ludus Magnus Studio is particularly known for various Kickstarter games that inspire with a great art style and excellent miniatures. Especially with great games like Black Rose Wars or Divide et impera Ludus Magnus was able to win fans in Germany. Trial of the Gods is currently a game about the publisher's own shop which does not require any of the crowdfunding frills and meets equally high requirements. You can find out how much fun the game is in this review.
Led by the brave Jason, the Argonauts, mythical heroes of ancient Greece, have finally arrived in the Aegean Sea after a long journey. Following the oracles of the mysterious sorceress Medea, the legendary champions set out to find the pieces of the Golden Fleece, an armor with divine powers that can heal any wound and make its owner immortal. But it is well hidden in fragments on the islands of the archipelago and defended by terrible monsters.
Battle for the Favor of the Gods
Trial of the Gods is a deck builder in which we, as one of the Argonauts' champions, want to win the favor of the gods in order to secure a place on Olympus. To do this, we have to convince the gods in four challenges and collect the most laurel wreaths in each one. Each challenge is different from the other. While we fight monsters in the supremacy challenge, in the exploration challenge we have to explore as many islands as possible and, ideally, find pieces of the fleece. For the Olympic challenge, we have to achieve the best possible placings in the Olympic Games and in the devotion challenge we have to win the most laurels for our collected cards. Depending on how well we did in each challenge at the end of the game, we get more or fewer victory points.
A game lasts four or five rounds, depending on whether you are playing an advanced mode or not. Each round has five phases: the twilight, adventure, opponent, Olympic and sunset phases. At the start of a round, players have the opportunity to acquire new cards and improvements in the twilight phase. Depending on which gods have given their blessing to your champion, cards can be drawn from the corresponding decks and then acquired by paying energy. We can also train allies that we collect during the game and use their abilities for the rest of the game. In this way, we improve our options round after round and can plan better and better moves.
Traveling through the Aegean
The adventure phase is the main phase of Trial of the Gods. Each person performs up to two actions, then it is the next person's turn. This continues until all players have passed. We can complete most of the actions with the cards in our hand. These have four different symbols that represent different actions. If we play a card, we can choose one and use it to either move around the map, restore energy, send allies and tamed monsters after other players, or heal ourselves. Alternatively, we can also use the ability on the card.
When moving across the map, we can travel across the seas and visit the islands on the map. However, when moving, we must watch out for monsters and other Argonauts in the sea and on the islands. If we are on the same field as a monster/Argonaut, we can continue to move, but we receive shame markers, which are important for ties at the end of the game. The more we collect, the more likely we are to lose a tie, which can certainly happen given the small number of points we receive at the end.
Monsters and enemy Argonauts
We can avoid so-called “direct action” against them battle. Direct actions do not require hand cards to activate them. However, we do need cards to fulfill certain requirements for direct actions. For battles, the battle symbol or card effects from your own hand cards are used. First of all, we play up to three cards and determine their attack strength. Then we determine the strength of our opponent based on his fixed strength and a fixed number of dice. The dice determine how much strength our opponent gains. If our strength is higher, we do one damage. If our strength is at least four points higher than the opponent's, he takes two damage. Each type of opponent has two lives. The latter would therefore defeat an opponent directly.
If a monster or argonaut is defeated, they join forces with us. We also conquer the temple on the land (if it doesn't already belong to anyone) and thus receive an improvement to our personal game board, as well as the favor of any god. This god then grants us more cards from his stack in the twilight phase, which we can then add to our deck if necessary.
With the card symbol "Command" we can summon our monsters and allies on the map and prevent our human opponents from making any progress. They have to defeat the monsters quickly, because if a monster is on an island with its own temple, you will suffer damage in the following opponent phase, which also reduces the number of cards you can draw. Since these are needed for almost all actions, this is usually not a good idea.
With a second direct action, islands explored We can also do this if there are enemy units on the island. When exploring, we have to use the flame symbols on our cards to reach the number of flames that can be seen under the island. If we have managed this, we have explored this island and possibly also discovered part of the fleece, which earns us laurel leaves for the exploration score.
fight for Olympic gold
After all players have passed and all monsters or Argonauts have attacked the players in the following opponent phase if they were in the same area as a player's champion or a conquered temple, the game moves on to the Olympic phase. In this phase, the players compete for valuable champion tokens in an Olympic discipline that was determined at the beginning of the round. Each discipline specifies two card symbols that must be served. At the beginning of the phase, new cards are drawn and then played in order to outdo the symbols of the Olympic discipline as much as possible compared to the other players. After three rounds, the person who has collected the most points wins. While the winning person gets two tokens, the second-placed person gets one token. Whoever has the most at the end of the game wins the favor of the gods in the Olympic challenge.
Then, in the sunset phase, the game board is cleared again and, depending on the improvements to your own tableau, energy is restored to buy cards or redeem certain card effects. Once the last round has been played, the four challenges of the gods are scored. These award different amounts of victory points depending on your placement. In the event of a tie, tiebreakers determine the victory. The shame markers mentioned above play a particularly important role in determining who wins and who doesn't. The person who has the most points after the four challenges have been scored wins.
Information about Trial of the Gods
| Number of players: 2 – 4 Age: from 14 years Playing time: 60 (-100) minutes Difficulty: expert game Long-term motivation: medium Classification: Deck Building, Exploration Author: Diego Latini Illustrations: Paolo Scippo, Jonata Benevenuti, Elisa Fiore, Diana Maranzano Publisher: Ludus Magnus Studio Official Website: Link Year of publication: 2024 Language: English Cost: 65 Euro |
Conclusion
Trial of the Gods is a pretty interesting game with its challenge system. It doesn't help anyone if you're particularly good at one of them and not at the others. A good balance is therefore particularly important here. This can lead to you only being mediocre in all challenges, but you still emerge as the winner at the end. This also keeps it exciting as to who will actually win in the end, because it's never obvious.
However, this is not really satisfying and you constantly think that you are not doing well in the game. In addition, the abundance of actions, disciplines and cards - especially at the beginning - can seem a bit overwhelming. Unfortunately, the instructions don't help much here either, although they are well written and easy to understand. But in the game itself, they seem a bit confusing.
It's really cool to optimize your own deck based on the favor of the gods. Since each god has a different focus (Hades, for example, has nasty effects for our opponents, while Poseidon makes us more agile on the board), there are numerous ways to design your deck. Since we have a certain starting direction thanks to our starting hero, this can result in a wide variety of decks and therefore strategies. However, there is no overview of which god gives which specializations. This makes getting into the game all the more difficult.
What is also impressive is the table presence and the quality of the individual components. The game has numerous wooden figures that simply look good on the board. The little temples and card holders for these are also a nice gimmick that you don't want to miss. The cards themselves are pleasant to the touch and the personal game boards are double-layered. A well-thought-out cardboard insert is also included. Great!
But even if the insert is well thought out, the game itself doesn't always feel that way. Trial of the Gods comes with ideas that are really good and are actually a lot of fun. Personally, I always found the test games exciting, as the games were always decided by a very close margin. But sometimes it feels somehow wrong. Something is missing and isn't explained sufficiently. At other times, you're excited about the possibilities that this game can offer. All in all, I can only say that Trial of the Gods is worth a look. But it didn't completely blow us away. It raised too many questions that we couldn't answer.
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