Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
They talk about iconic dynamic duos: Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and now Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson. But hold the phone! They’re back with a third, Brett J. Gilbert, evolving their design-duo superpowers into a full-fledged trio.
Many will recognize Benjamin and Thompson from modern classics such as the Undaunted series, War Chest, and Resist!. Factor in the euro-y talents of Gilbert, whose credits include Mandala and The Guild of Merchant Explorers, and For the Gods! couldn’t hit the table fast enough.
I’ll admit, as much as I love the idea of wargames and “dudes on a map,” I’m often quite bad at them and, as a result, tend to admire them from afar.
For the Gods! is a dudes-on-a-map game, yes, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s a clever bag-building and hand-management game driving the entire experience.
After Mighty Boards blew past its crowdfunding goal by more than tenfold, I was curious to see whether all those ingredients would come together into something worthy of Olympus.
Zeus himself would approve.
For the Gods! is an area-majority game where players sail around ancient Greece, building towering temples dedicated to the gods. Each player begins with the same distribution of numbered stones, valued from 0–3, tucked away inside their personal bag. You draw five each turn, spend stones to move your ship around the archipelago, and then use the remainder to build.
The catch is that every stone used to build a temple must share the same value. Once you’ve established a temple in a region, you can return later to keep stacking compatible stones onto it, slowly building your monument toward the heavens. Building in a region can also earn you one of the god stones scattered across the map, which gets tossed into your bag and may show up in a future draw.
Eventually, those god stones come back out, allowing you to dedicate one of your temples to that particular deity and trigger its special ability. Depending on player count, four to six of the game’s twelve gods appear each session, creating a healthy amount of variability. The whole thing keeps moving until someone can no longer refill their required hand from their bag, triggering the endgame and the final battle for glory.
What pleasantly surprised me was just how snappy and clean For the Gods! operates.
During the first third of my first game, I looked across these mostly barren islands and thought, “Where’s the rub?” There are so many regions out here that we can’t possibly end up bickering over land.
Oh, how wrong I was.
By the midgame, temples are sprouting everywhere. Everyone has spread out across the archipelago, the easy god stones have largely disappeared, and suddenly that spacious map starts closing in around you. What initially seemed like an abundance of precious real estate quickly turns into a scramble to protect what you already have.
Scoring is determined primarily by temple height within each region, so simply planting a bunch of tiny temples across Greece isn’t going to get the job done. Eventually, you have to return to those early investments and build upward, trying to shore up valuable regions while watching opponents sail suspiciously close to the monument you’ve spent the last half hour constructing.
This is absolutely a wargame for non-wargamers. The battling is less about tearing down what your opponents have created and more about outbuilding them. For how direct the competition is, For the Gods! rarely feels outright cutthroat. Instead, you’re constantly edging one another out in a tug-of-war for height. I build two stones here, you sail over and add three. I respond with another two, only for someone else to suddenly reveal that they’ve been hoarding exactly what they need to leapfrog both of us.
Every turn carries some tension because player shields hide the values of everyone’s stones, and there’s always that lingering mystery of exactly what remains in each bag. Since everyone begins with the same distribution, six stones of each value, you can practically card-count your way toward figuring out whether someone actually has the stones needed to outbuild you.
But that’s where the bag draw becomes so important. You can chart the perfect course across the map, identify exactly where you need to build, and know precisely which opponent you need to overtake, but eventually it comes down to the stones you pull. Sure, you might want to outbuild someone in a juicy region, but first you have to spend stones just to sail there, then hope you still have enough matching values left to accomplish the task.
Movement requires discarding stones from your hand, which creates a delicious little dilemma. That 2-value stone could get you one step closer to the region you desperately need to contest, but what if it’s also part of the set you need to actually build once you arrive? Suddenly, a movement system becomes a constant exercise in opportunity cost.
Sometimes it’s even worth hovering around a harbor for another turn, waiting for the right draw before making your move. But in a game that rapidly accelerates toward its conclusion, sitting around carries its own risk. Tactical timing is everything.
And all of this in about an hour, even at max player count?
I think we have something here, folks.
It’s a refreshingly smooth system that’s simple enough to teach in a few minutes: move, build, draw. Sometimes the recipe doesn’t need a ton of different ingredients to make for a great time at the table. There’s also something immensely satisfying about watching those temples rapidly rise across the map, and their physical height makes comparing control almost effortless.
No need to compare attack and defense values or calculate a pile of modifiers. My tower is bigger than yours.
The base game comes with twelve different gods, all bringing their own powers to the table, from additional endgame scoring and building with multiple stone values to adding stones from the general supply and throwing a wrench into the plans of all those wannabe card counters. Many of the powers naturally synergize, offering plenty of strategic flexibility and giving each setup its own personality.
Even scaling down to two players works surprisingly well. With fewer players fighting over the map, the game becomes more of a semi-chess match as you anticipate where your opponent is heading and try to stay one move ahead. I definitely sniffed some War Chest DNA here.
For the Gods! strength lies in how much interaction and tension it squeezes out of such a streamlined system. It takes some of the territorial jockeying I enjoy about wargames, strips away the rules overhead, and transforms the whole thing into a colorful temple-building arms race.
It’s approachable enough that I could bring it to the table with players from all sorts of gaming backgrounds, yet there’s enough beneath the surface that I’m already thinking about what I could have done differently after each game.
For the Gods! turns wargaming into a build fest, and for someone who usually admires dudes-on-a-map games from a comfortable distance, this is exactly the sort of battle I’m happy to fight.
