‘Once Etherium was plentiful. Spiritual leaders mastered it, ending famine. Children used traces to craft charms. The land was peaceful.
But Etherium dwindled.
It receded to a single site. The mighty battled to control this place, a forge where immensely powerful artefacts could be crafted. By weaving Etherium and other elements in proper proportion, Titans could be summoned or devastating sorcery conjured, giving these wizards the power of gods.
You are one such, fighting to control the Godsforge.
You are an elite spell caster, battling for control of the Godsforge. Craft Creations and Spells to defeat your opponents. Take the last ebb of their life force and be the last one standing.’
3 words to describe this game: magic, elemental and struggle Gameplay: Essentially this game plays over a series of rounds, which are comprised of four phases. These phases are upkeep, forge, reveal and attack. Players complete the phases simultaneously. You start each round with 4 cards, which you can change in the upkeep phase by discarding two cards and replenishing back up to 4. Then you move on to the forge roll. Rolling your four dice, you are trying to roll to activate your spells and creations. You are able to reroll two dice and if you land a 1 or a 6, these can have additional effect on the dice roll. You are able to combine dice to create elements which help you cast your spells and creations (all detailed in the rule book) and if you cannot cast anything on a turn or you roll a 6 which isn’t used then you can collect veilstones. These veilstones will enable you to change dice rolls up or down on future turns and also activate specific spells and creations. You reveal any crafted cards and use any reveal effects and then comes the attack phase. You count up attack points and then look at any cards that’s protect you. You then lose lives or gain lives depending on the cards. The last player surviving is the winner. Components: Board - fairly simple, score track on the board which is nice to have it all in the same place but a nice touch would have been somewhere to store the veilstones so they don’t just roll around the board Card deck - cool artwork and love the idea that you can create different spells and creations helping you to build your strength against your opponent Veilstones - these are ok, at least they have a shape to them but not great quality 17 dice - dice are dice but they match the scoring tokens and there is a purple and red one so that’s my wife and I sorted 4 scoring tokens - again purple and red so all sorted in this house
Overall thoughts: It’s an ok game. It plays quite nicely; set up is super easy, it’s easy to teach to new players and it’s great as a filler. For me, it just feels like something is missing. The elements are mentioned in the rule book but when you come to play, you are really just looking for numbers on dice and you don’t really refer to the elements again. It feels like this game should be so good and don’t get me wrong, it is enjoyable but it just feels like it’s not fully finished or corners have been cut. The elemental symbols could have perhaps been put on the dice so that it was an integral part of the game. It just feels it misses the mark a little with the concept coming through in the gameplay. However, that being said, I do want to play this game again and I think it will be better at higher play count. I like that players play simultaneously so no waiting around while others take their turns and I am sure we will play this with our gaming group before too long.
Thank you to Atlas games for sending me this copy of Godsforge for review