I’m just settling into the game of Olympos; not ‘there’ yet, but I’m working on it. It’s a Philippe Keyaerts game, with some similarities to his Small World game. They’ve got the same movement of armies across defined borders on a map. They’ve both got the same automatic victory for an attacker. I can get from the start to game’s end without consulting the rule book (of Olympos, at least). But there’s something missing; a light switch somewhere that I know I’m going to find. I’ll turn it on and say “Ah, hah!!!”
Just as a point of reference, I’m still looking for that light switch with a lot of games in my collection, but I digress. . .
You’re living “at the dawn of civilization,” with the “plains of the Peloponnese,” in front of you. In other words, you’re on a peninsula in Greece somewhere. You’re trying to run the place you’re calling Olympos, which embraces some island territory called Atlantis. Very mythical.
You do your thing by venturing forth from a common starting place, with a wooden token in your favorite color (maybe not), and when you come to a stop, you collect stuff, which, after quite a few turns of this movement and collection, will ultimately determine whether you win or lose. So far, it could be Monopoly, with maybe a ‘Get Out of the Acropolis’ card. It’ll pull away from this vague similarity quickly, especially when you start looking around for dice. There are no dice. The measure of your success at this adventure will be (all together now) victory points.
Technically, the first player in this game could end the game on his or her opening move. Here’s why. . . .
The ‘currency’ for performing actions in this game is time. Each action you take, each army (token) you move out there onto the map, picking stuff up, or conquering other opponents is going to cost you time. You will generally get a lot of tokens out onto the board, and they’ll each eat up ‘time,’ too. This time is measured in single units on a board perimeter scoring track, and is virtually unlimited. You have a separate colored token that moves around the perimeter of the board, tallying your time units; so many actions, so many spaces forward on the time track around the square board. You would generally, in this game, be taking an average of between three and seven time units to complete a turn, maybe nine, at the outside.
There are 65 spaces between the start space and the third corner of the board. The first token that rounds the third corner of this ‘time track’ (which is one of six ‘Zeus’ spaces) signals the end of the game. When he passes this Zeus space, this first player, he will eventually stop, sooner rather than later, because of a point differential in the last row that favors stopping almost as soon as you round the corner; there are two spaces there that add 5 VPs to your score. When it is this player’s turn again, he/she has the option of passing or taking a final turn. If the player passes, game over. If he takes a last turn, then the other players are allowed to ‘finish,’ which is left open to interpretation; the actual wording is: “When all the players have finished, the points are added up.”
There is nothing to stop the game’s first player from moving his token out onto the map, where every step he takes costs him an action, and just continuing to move. He could walk his single token through the peninsula, one territory at a time, and just keep doing it. Cross the ocean. It’ll cost him two time units. Fine, he just goes back and forth and around the ocean spaces. It’ll take half the actual time, because ocean movement chews up two time units per move.
The trick in all of this is that once that first player rounds the third corner, he has to wait until it is his turn again, before deciding to pass or take a final turn. This means that everybody else has to get out in front of him on the 13-space track at the end, because turn order in this game is always last-first. If you’re way back on the scoring track, and don’t gobble enough time on the track to pass someone, you get another turn. And you keep getting another turn until you get in front of somebody, and then, it’s their turn. That’s how it rolls.
So our smart aleck first player sits there, and keeps counting out movement, and ticking off the time units, moving around the board . . .35, 36. . .41, 42. . .53, 54. . .64, 65. . oops, I’ve triggered the end game. But wait, now I have to sit here and watch everybody else catch up to me. I could be here for hours, doing nothing.
It seems unlikely that anyone would do this, but the mechanisms of the game don’t offer a way to prohibit it. If you spend the early part of the game, collecting point-bearing developments, and occupying a lot of territory, you might just get the urge to speed the game along by doing a bit of aimless wandering around the board to eat up some time units, but you’d want to bear in mind that if you get way out in front, you’ll sit there until someone passes you before you get another turn. And they’ll be moving around taking some of what you just picked up away from you.
There is, of course, the game behind this ‘time track’ business. The point of the token movement on the map is basically to land on and occupy territory, for which you receive a cardboard token representing that territory’s prime resource; either grain, stone, wood or gold. These resources are more or less spread all over the map in different territories, generally, in a balanced way.
You want these resource tokens, so that you can use them to purchase what are known as Developments; a collection of 30 colorful tiles, full of all sorts of beneficial goodness, not to mention two points for every one you’ve got at game’s end. Look, there’s a Medicine token. Yours for a song; one gold resource and one stone resource. You were handed one of these resources (one of those ubiquitous wooden cubes) at the start of the game, and you’ll generally move your first movement token (wooden ‘army’) into a territory that has a second resource you want (this one in the form of a cardboard token, not a cube), based on which development you want early. Gonna take you a while to load up enough to buy some of the more expensive developments. So you snag Medicine, and now, instead of it costing you two actions (time units) to put a new army (token) on the board, it’ll only cost you one. Grabbing a Development, by the way, is the time equivalent of moving seven spaces on the board.
They got this one tile (Commerce) that lets you pick up two resource cubes of your choice, just like that. You could pick up Cavalry, a really good tile in my opinion, because not only do you pick up two ‘hourglasses’ (which represent time units that you can use instead of actual movement on the track; sort of a way of slowing your movement down). Not only that, but with the Cavalry, contiguous land movement costs one action, regardless of the number of spaces moved. When you ‘pay’ for these Development tiles, you lose the resource cube, but retain the resource token, because the token was obtained when you moved in and occupied a territory, and it’s yours until someone comes along and decides they want to take it away from your, which they can do, just by marching in and plunking their token on top of yours.
This is known as a battle. Some Development tiles, which you may have picked up prior to doing battle, have swords on them. If you do march on in with the intent of snatching a territory (and its resource) away from somebody, your attack is going to cost you time; one unit, if you have more swords than the guy you’re attacking, two if the swords are equal (to include zero swords), and three, if the guy you’re attacking has more swords than you.
Then we have the Destiny cards, Zeus spaces and Olympos cards, which are related temporally. There are six Zeus spaces on the board, more or less evenly spread out between spaces 1 and 65. When someone, anyone, passes this Zeus space, they draw a Destiny card and turn a pre-placed Olympos card over. The Destiny card is like a little reward; you pick up a resource cube, or get to pick up a few VP tokens if you’re in possession of the most gold territory (for example), or if you have the most grain, you get a two-space hourglass. Stuff like that.
There are 10 Olympos cards, nine of which are randomly placed beneath the board at the Zeus spaces. Five of these are good things, five not so good. They all relate and hinge on possession of Zeus tokens, which you can pick up on the map, or by picking up Development tiles or Destiny cards, which display them. Five of the cards will say something like “The player with the most Zeus tokens gets to order out for pizza,” while the other five say things like “the player with the least Zeus tokens has to pay for it.” In actuality, you’ll pick up, or lose, things like victory points, resource cubes, or, in one case, the player with the least will be prevented from moving on any sea spaces until the next Olympos card is drawn. Again, stuff like that.
I like the ticking clock of this game. It adds a touch of tension, like in the movies when part of the plot centers on a more or less real ticking clock – War Games, 8 Minutes, or any James Bond movie you can think of. I like that the Development tiles are laid out on a thick, paper stock board (separate from the main board) randomly, so that different tiles might, from game to game, require the acquisition of different resources, causing players to move out and seek different territories.
I’m not exactly sure why, at the beginning, you lay down a certain number of resource tiles onto territories, upside down (showing a cross) that blocks those territories from being occupied (and their resources from being obtained). Why not just throw the whole place open, use all the resource tiles on all the territories? Or make the map smaller and reduce the resource tokens?
Your effectiveness in this game will increase as you become familiar with the Development tiles. You discover and retain, for example, the knowledge that possession of an Architecture development tile, gains you a star (necessary to purchase Monuments, which are part of the Development tile display) and that when you buy a Monument (costing a variable amount of stars), you pay two stars less. Possession of these Monuments add major points to your end game score, between eight and 12, I think. They’re not depicted in the rules, and I’m not going to grab up the tiles and sift through them to find all the Monument points.
I’ve yet to develop a sense of direction with this; how to go about developing everything simultaneously - getting out onto the board capturing territory, taking ‘time’ to bring more armies out, battling opponents, and deciding which Development tiles to pursue. In my early experiences with the game (and I taught it a lot at the WBC this year), battles have not been an apparent priority. In the early going, there’s enough territory (and the resources they generate) to go around.
I count 32 territories, which, minus the eight that are covered up at the start, makes 24 available. With four players (you can play with 3-5), that’s six each before you have to start butting heads to steal things. You start the game with only four movement tokens (your armies). You have to get two more of them on the board before you have to start worrying about snatching stuff from other players. The Development tiles are so varied in the resources required to obtain them (and this changes with every game), it’s almost as if you could head on out there and do what you gotta do, without messing with anybody. Not sure this is the best way to go, though. It might be best to start creating a ruckus right away. Attack everything in site. You get the resource, and let your opponent spend time fighting back if he or she is so inclined. You’re going to pick up a VP for every territory in your possession at the end. Two for every section of Atlantis you possess. You also get one VP for each Destiny card still in your hand, whatever VPs you’ve managed to pick up during the game, and two VPs per Development tile you’ve got. Games I’ve seen with four players indicate that between five and six of these Development cards is about average.
Again, the key is knowing the Development cards. With their two-per-tile bonus at the end, and the in-game benefits they provide, figuring out which are the good ones, and which, perhaps, are the clunkers becomes important. Not there yet, personally. Still floundering around, trying this, trying that. And you will be, too, so don’t expect to sit yourself down and settle right in, either. This one’ll take you some time.
All that said, I’d call it time well spent. Average rating on BoardGameGeek is at 7.66, and none of the 98 people who chose to comment, rated it below “5.” I may not have settled into it, as yet, but I’ve managed to figure out that I want to. I’m guessing you will, too.
Olympos, designed by Philippe Keyaerts, with illustrations by Arnaud Demaegd, is published by Rio Grande Games (copy supplied for review). It’s for 3-5 players, and is recommended for ages 10 and up, although realistically, the lower limit is probably closer to 12 years old. It should take about 90 minutes to play, although one’s first game or two is likely to take longer, as players continually refer to the rules for component explanations. Retail price is around $35, with normal variances, depending on where you purchase.
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