Age of Mythology: The Boardgame

Glenn Drover (2003)

7/10

Here's a blast from the past, in some ways good and in some ways bad. First the bad: the components are super dated and the gameplay has tons of dice rolling. There is a ton of combat and it's all resolved through extremely repetitive die rolls. That's because they are simulating individual unit vs unit attacks in skirmishes within an RTS game.

Now the good: I fucking love that RTS game. It was my favorite as a kid who was into mythology. It was a blast and some great fun. Surprisingly, I think the board game does a good job at simluating it. There are far fewer units, which is funny because one player complained there were too many, but it preserves the tactical rock-paper-scissors element of the computer game. The action selection through a hand of cards and choice between cards that you know what they will be and more powerful versions of those same cards from a random deck is something I've never seen before and has been fun as certain friends of mine love taking nothing but randoms. Even something like the asymmetry in the resource tile spaces available (among other things) does a great job of representing the unique Greek, Norse, and Egyptian races from the computer game.

It also comes with a metric ton of minis for all those units. Quite toyetic. If it weren't for the long playtime and the super repetitive dice rolling, I would go so far as to say it's a great game. It's definitely a good one though and pleasantly surprised me. I think I'll keep it.