God's Playground

EvEvanstar5,9

This is a game where you play as Polish princes during a time when Poland was getting in invaded by everyone always. In this game, you place settlement tokens into areas and try to fight off the invasion cubes of the enemy forces. You are playing semi-co-op in terms of fighting the enemies, but really you are just out for whatever points you can grab before the hordes overtake everyone. It's a wonderful, brutal euro points grab game. One of the most fascinating twists of the game comes from any player's ability to evict all the government cubes from the box, which severely hampers player's ability to mitigate the invasions. To stop this from happening you want to arrange it so other players think they have more to lose than gain from taking this action. The game has a lot of "phases" during the 4 rounds, but the phases run quickly and many are just bookkeeping updates. Combat is dice based, so randomness happens in this game. I'm ok with it in this case because it's absolutely a game of trying to get punched less than other players. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★★☆☆ Raw enjoyment