Create legendary stories for your Elysium.

'Mythic Greece. As an upstart demigod, you want to earn the favor of the Olympians and become a figure of legend yourself.  Gather heroes and powerful artefacts, please the gods and bear their power to write your own epic tale.

Let your allies achieve their destiny and enter the Elysium, home of the glorious and the brave. Once the stories are written, only one demigod will be chosen to stand at the side of Zeus.

Elysium is a game of set collecting and combinations in which players recruit cards representing heroes, items, powers and gods. These cards have many different powers and you can create powerful combination to earn gold (the help of the gods) and victory points (the favor of the gods). Each card belongs to one of the eight Olympians gods (a family), and shows a level (1 to 3).

During the five turns of the game, players will try to transfer their cards to the Elysium and write their own Legends, which are series of cards from the same family or from different families of the same level. The more epic the Legends, the more favor from the gods they’ll earn. But as they go to Elysium, most cards lose their power and players will therefore have to renounce some of their combinations !

A game of balance and opportunity with  simple action, but constant dilemmas and complex strategies.' (source: http://www.greatboardgames.ca/elysium.html)

I am not going to get into how to play the game, instead have a look at the video below:

 

 

Hope you enjoyed that video... onto the review of the game. First I have to say I LOVE the box; I mean it looks like a Greek pantheon and everything has a place (well almost). The artwork is amazing and the durability of the card stock is very rigid and is going to last a long time of gameplay. The only down side is that there is no room for future family expansions.

 

If you have played Abyss (review coming soon), which I did and loved as well, you will love this game; it is very similar in game mechanics but with a Greek theme instead of an underwater theme.

I started getting away from your typical deck building games to start playing this sort of deck building game where instead of collecting cards to play again later, you collect cards to create legends and gain end-game points or even use the card's abilities while they are in your main area (until you transfer them).

 

The first few times I played this game, other players seem to have a hard time with the 'paying' method... you need a certain colour to purchase a card, but you don't have to use that color to 'pay' for it... but after a while they started seeing the methodology and everything came together for a great gaming experience.

 

The replay value of this game is great as you have 8 families to choose from and 5 get chosen to play each game. Each family has themed abilities that benefit that family however, there are some abilities that are repeated in each family but combined with other families can mean a great deal of end game points.

There are two families (Ares and Apollo) that have some extra flavour to them: Ares will add the prestige points (which they call PP points) and Apollo has the ability to see future cards with the help of the oracle. Also the more players you are, the more cards there are to purchase from the lineup of cards and better quests to fulfill. Also having different turn orders almost every round makes things very interesting.

There are a few card combos that could cause the game to become broken but other than that this game is really fun and easy to learn.

4.5 Dice out of 5

 

 



It's all fang and games 'till dawn!

A vampire game that actually follows the true nature of the vampire... suck blood all night long before dawn appears to kill you.

TILL DAWN is really simple to learn and fun to play: it plays over three rounds and the point is to collect (suck) as much blood as you can before dawn (and dawn can show up really quickly if the wrong cards are drawn too soon in the round).
Here is what you get in the box (coffin):

Your main deck of HUNT cards (where things like drinking blood will occur at different areas in town, or a vampire slayer will appear to hunt you down and try and kill you, a werewolf will also appear and could potentially kill you as well or invitation cards that allow you to bet on what the next card will be and if correct, gain more blood, or be incorrect and lose life).

You also get an event deck that is used when a HUNT card shows up with a cross on it; some of these events can be used immediately or in the future (before the game ends of course).

There is a third, power, deck where each player receives one random card from this deck, at the start of each round, to use during the round (at the end of round, all power cards are re-shuffled and given out again to each player for the next round).

You get character boards that have the number of lives they have (all 5) and an area where they like to hunt the most (which also gives one extra blood if that location comes out in the hunt deck) and then some flavour text. You also get four 5 voting cards for invitations (one of each type of moon that appears on hunt cards and one to reject the invitation - which costs you one blood to do so).

You get a bunch of blood tokens (but if you run out the round ends) and coffin tokens (which you trade in you blood tokens for at the end of each round and these are used to count the final points at the end of the three rounds).

Game play is very simple... starting with the oldest player, the player takes the top card of the HUNT deck and reveals and all players either gain blood equal to the amount shown plus an extra one if the favourite hunting ground is shown for the character or loses life or decides to participate in the invitation or move the dawn token forward or backward on the top of the box (yes the box is used as the time tracker).

Once the card is resolved, the players, starting on the left of the current player, get to decide to stay awake or enter their coffin (unless a couple of sun rising cards have show up early, this will not happen too fast in a round). If the player enters their coffin, they flip their character card over and retain the blood they sucked (gathered) to trade in for coffin tokens at the end of the round.

Then, the next player takes the Hunt deck and reveals the next card and this continues until everyone is asleep in the coffins, or the blood tokens run out or the sun rises (which any vampire still awake immediately dies and loses all the blood they collected - a player will also lose all blood if they die during the round because they lost all their lives).

A new round begins and the next oldest player starts the round and everyone comes back to life for more blood-sucking fun.

This is a great party game and a great filler game between long games... I really recommend it. The artwork is really well done and the game stays true to the actual vampire nature.

5 out 5 fangs.