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