ANKH: Gods Of Egypt

Ever since it was announced last GenCon, fans have been eagerly awaiting the next installment in the legendary saga that began with Blood Rage and continued with Rising Sun. The same creative team, including game design by Eric Lang, art by Adrian Smith, and sculpts by Mike McVey, are proud to bring you ANKH: Gods of Egypt, coming soon to Kickstarter! The gods that rule over Egypt can no longer share the devotion of the people. One by one, the gods must fall into oblivion, until only one will remain. Spread your forces across the land, build monuments to establish your dominion, reshape the land to your advantage, gain followers to increase your powers and get the support of powerful guardians. As the sands soak the blood in conflicts decided by both strength and cunning, each god will use their unique power to climb to the top of the devotion ladder. Will you be the one to achieve life eternal?

The storyline of the game, the reason for such conflict – beyond sibling rivalry – is the transition undertaken in ancient Egypt from polytheism to monotheism.

“The people are losing faith in the gods,” says Lang, “One by one the gods are actually dropping off as they lose the devotion of their followers. And you want to be the last god standing. I should say one or more because in this game, unlike any other mythology, two gods can actually merge together during the course of the game become one god – like Amun-Ra or Bastet.”

This mechanic is one where an event in the game forces the player lagging behind the other gods in devotion to join with another god. This melding of the gods fits with the way that the Egyptians, over time, joined together gods like Amun and Ra to form Amun-Ra as a kind of father-of-all life god amongst the gods. Interestingly this nods towards the mutability of the beings we control in Ankh: Gods of Egypt – while they are all powerful, they are at the whims of man, collectively.

“Gods are rated in devotion, which is the stat that allows you to stay in the game. It’s sort of analogous to victory points except it’s not really a VP track. Your status goes up and down as you gain or lose devotion,” says Lang, “It’s the only ‘track’ in the game. You start in the bottom third, and you are trying to gain the devotion of followers by conquering regions or worshiping at monuments or erecting cool things for them.”

“And you lose monuments by losing battles or by causing plagues and all that bad stuff. So, it has upward and downward mobility. As the game goes on, near the end of the game, players that are stuck in too low devotion will actually be eliminated, although, not for very long.”

Gameplay wise this newly joined god still plays as two separate entities. They take separate turns, take their own actions and command their own warriors on the board. The conjoined god is judged on the devotion of the least worshiped of the two players.

“So even though they get double the actions and double the power, they actually have to take care of the worst performing one of the two,” explains Lang. This acts as a kind of swing moment, rebalancing in the game. The additional actions, and the focus of having two players working together suggests these events aren’t defeats, just marks for getting revenge. “It’s a dynamic that I really liked. I haven’t seen it before in a game like this. I wanted to make a game that earned its own place on the shelf.”

Out of the box players will be able to become the powerful gods of ancient Egypt in the forms of Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Ra and Amun. The game promises to be highly asymmetrical, with each god feeling distinctly different from the others on the board. We asked Lang for a couple of ways which these gods interact with the board and one another.

“Amun is the keeper of the underworld,” explains Lang, “Normally, just like in Blood Rage and Rising Sun, if any of your figures die for any reason, they just go back to your pool and you can re-summon them again. In the case of Amun, when he’s in play, if any figures die, he can actually take that figure and take them into the underworld. And he gains strength for every figure that’s in the underworld. If anybody wants to take their figure back from him, they have to give Amun a follower, which is the main ‘currency’ of the game.”

As much of the game is about courting followers and devotion, it’s also about tripping up your fellow gods. It is easy to see how these interactions work against other players. Some powers are a vicious tax like those granted by Amun, whereas others are more insidious – less obviously evil until an action is taken.

“Isis is a protector. Her pieces are able to share spaces with other warriors unlike anybody else. If any of her figures are killed, instead, those sharing the space with their figures are killed. She’s really good at protecting her own people and making other people their shields.”

This kind of cut-throat play style will go down well with those looking for high intensity action on the board. Everything you do in Ankh: Gods of Egypt has a very real feeling heft to it. But the powers of the gods don’t just end with their effects on the warriors and followers around them. The very earth can be changed in huge and sweeping ways. The board itself, originally set out with three regions separated by the Nile (Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt and the Delta) can be altered dramatically. The board state can be quickly reformed by any individual player with a single action – including dividing regions up, so while on your turn a monument was in your region, that can quickly be flipped on its head by another player.

“As you progress down the timeline of events players get to place these camels on the game to form caravans, which split regions into two. This creates a new region on the board and players are incentivized to do that to their advantage,” says Lang. With this we can see something of the central ‘desperate but powerful’ theme coming through. While you as a god are claiming the devotion of others, the areas you can make those claims from are splitting. As the gods meld together, the world fractures. This leads to even more emergent narrative, as well as variety between games.

“So the map is going to look different every time you play the game because it gets divided in different ways based on the needs of a player at any given time,” says Lang “every time you play it’s just going to look like you’ve, you’ve redrawn the map in different ways.”

These huge power plays are part of the core flow of the game. A series of actions are taken by the players until one of the thresholds has been hit. This triggers the timeline to move on another notch, moving event to event. This tells you what happens in the game, whether that’s building pyramids, dividing regions, triggering conflict for monuments, and so on.

“And when an event hits, whichever player triggered the event is going to control how to split that region. So ultimately there’s a lot of timing in the game,” says Lang. Players are always building towards the next event, the next threshold being reached. While there is a conflict for a monument coming up, there may be also a regional shift coming up after, meaning players will want to work the board to their long-term strategic advantage.

“In reality, of course, you cannot possibly win everything,” says Lang, “so you literally have to pick your battles.”