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Review of Kyklades: Hades / Cyclades: Hades
Blurb from the publisher: 'Hades will awaken his army of the undead. All Great Gods will unleash their power. Heroes of lore will jump into the fight. It is now your chance to be part of the Legend...
The Cyclades are currently at peace, but the sound of furious battles still echoes in our memories. Is this a long lasting peace or nothing but a short truce? There are whispers that Hades will soon return, escorted by his undead phalanxes and ghost ships.
Each city-state must demonstrate their ability to recruit powerful heroes and gain the favors of the Gods of Olympus, including the terrible Hades, to extend their supremacy over their rivals...'
What you get: Your EUR 35 or equivalent will buy you Kyklades: Hades, an expansion for the widely successful civilization-building Kyklades game line, whose basic game is currently ranked in Boardgamegeek as the 114th best game of all times. It hosts 3-6 players and can be played in around an hour and a half. Seeing how Kyklades: Hades is an expansion, it cannot be played without the basic game.
The rulebook can be found in English and French on Matagot's website for you to better understand the game before purchasing it. The box contains the following: six Rulebooks (in English, French, Romanian, Greek, Russian and Spanish), six Reference Sheets (one per aforementioned language), one Necropolis building, 4 Theater Buildings, 8 Prosperity markers, one Hades tile, 8 Divine Favors tiles, 5 Undead Troops minis, 5 Undead Fleet minis, one Hades Column, 6 Hero minis, one Cerberus mini, 6 Hero cards, 10 Magic Item cards, 5 Mythological Creatures cards, and 8 Priestess cards.
Like the basic game the expansion is language neutral. The languages it hosts are not identical to the ones in the basic game. Seeing how the rules are provided in 6 different languages and everything on the board and cards is explained through easy to understand pictographs, practically anybody can play.
Gameplay: Kyklades: Hades is an expansion with four different modular elements that can be mixed and matched with the basic game in any way you wish.
The first module is called Free Positioning, and is based on an auction. At the beginning of the game players receive 7 gold instead of 5, and will bid on different gods. During the preliminary round however, only one player can bid for Apollo. The players then get to choose their islands, starting from the player that wins the auction for the first god, Apollo being always the last. Depending on the god, a player may get an additional unit, e.g. additional fleet (from Poseidon), an additional troop (from Ares) etc. Troops must be deployed in two different islands at least; idem for the fleets. Fun fact: the players will not receive income for the first round.
The second module is Hades & His Undead, and is the main attraction of the present expansion. Hades has a nine-track tile. Before the Gods phase, a player rolls two combat dice; Hades will progress that much towards the end of the track. Once he reaches it, Hades replaces one of the other gods. The god tiles are shuffled and are placed as usual. Then Hades will cover the god that came up just above Apollo. Hades' reign lasts for only a round. At its end (i.e. after the Apollo player finishes his turn), all undead units are removed from the board, Hades' tile is turned back to its track side, and the count begins once again. While he is on the board however, he offers the player that won him one free undead troop or fleet, as well as more undead troops or fleets whose value increases incrementally. The Necropolis can be built on any one place for a Metropolis. Every time a regular military unit is eliminated, one gold is placed on the Metropolis. During the next Revenues phase the player controlling the island with the Metropolis pockets the money. Moving fleets or units while having Hades is the same as having Poseidon or Ares, with the added prerequisite that at least an undead unit accompanies the living ones.
Heroes & Creatures is the third module of the expansion, introducing four mythological creatures: Cerberus, Charon, the Furies, and Empusa. Heroes are recruited just like mythological creatures, they are not however mythological creatures, meaning the Temples don't provide a discount towards their hiring, and Zeus doesn't dismiss them. They remain in play for as long as their upkeep is paid (namely two gold pieces). Each Hero counts as a troop, but he also has a unique military as well as a sacrificial power that is activated when you willingly sacrifice him during your action phase. As an example Achilles counts as two troops while Ulysses forbids an opponent from using Metropolis and Fortress bonuses when in a battle. Their sacrificial powers involve a Metropolis being built free of charge when Achilles is sacrificed (provided you have four islands), while a Metropolis will only cost a port, a temple and a university when Ulysses is sacrificed.
The fourth and final module is Divine Favors. It introduces both the Magic Item deck and the Divine Favours tiles, both of which are placed face down. The tiles and cards only show pictographs, with text being included on the reference sheet. The former includes items like Artemis' Arrows, Pandora's Box and The Palace on Mountain Olympus, offering effects like removing Heroes from the board, stealing Priestesses (a substitute for keeping Heroes on the board instead of paying in gold) from your opponents, and rearranging the gods after the shuffle. The Divine Favours tiles on the other hand are drawn randomly, turn after turn, and placed next to the god above Apollo. The player choosing that god (the one before the last) also gets the additional favour. Each favour provides a bonus item (either a Priestess or a Magic Item), and a power that may be used during this action phase. As an example, Aphrodite doubles the number of troops one one of your islands for 2 GP, while Hestia allows you to build a standard building of your choice for 2 GP.
The rulebook closes with an 10-question FAQ about how certain of its elements behave with the basic game.
The strong points: In contrast to Kyklades Titans which is an alternate take on Kyklades' basic mechanics, Hades builds up on top of the basic game in an approach that I personally applaud. The four add-ons are fully modular, and can be introduced gradually, when all players feel comfortable with the basic game. Some of the modules are more meaty than others. Even Free Positioning however, the obviously less meaty of all, provides asymmetry even before the game starts. For experienced players that's quite a thing.
I probably don't need to talk about how rich the theme is, and how enticing it becomes with this expansion. Its Divine Favours module managed to insert more gods of the dodecatheon even if they take a secondary role, while Heroes & Creatures include Empusa, an ancient monster that even an average Greek is not well acquainted with. Playing Kyklades means having one of the world's most inspired mythologies at your fingertips in a matter that befits it. There is strife, there are sacrifices, there is devotion, there are choices. When it comes to theme the game reaches new peaks with the addition of Kyklades: Hades.
The Hades module makes the game substantially more combative, and especially when Hades supplants one of the less warlike gods. His troops are cheaper than those of Ares, and while his fleets cost as much as Poseidon's, one can build more of them and mix and match them with troops as he wishes. They will only survive a round, yet quite a few things can be achieved during that time. My statistically irrelevant playtests showed that nobody would do something as silly as using undead troops only. Instead, those troops buffed up existing troops, and allowed for coordinated attacks seeing how they can die before your normal troops. The Necropolis is a much wanted building, seeing how it prints money whenever living units die irrespective to whom they belonged. If you don't control it, you might want to avoid the slaughter of your armies, and opt to throw the undead into the grinder.
Heroes are a clever construction in that if you want them to stick around you have to keep on paying. Their participation in combat is more than advantageous; Hector kills troops even before battle starts, while Midas allows for the rerolling of dice through paying money. That, however, is only one of their uses. The really good players are going to sacrifice them at just the right time, in order to obtain an even bigger advantage. In four out of six cases the bonus is linked to a Metropolis, even when it is not however (like with Hector or Perseus) the effects can be devastating. Perseus' sacrifice means instant teleportation of all the troops that were with him to an island not protected by a Hero; in short, you can't afford not to have a Hero is somebody has Perseus, unless you wish to find a full army on your back yard. The addition of all these creatures to the deck also leads to a rather profound alteration of Zeus' card-swapping power. Why? Because the more cards there are, the less likely it is for Zeus to prohibit his opponents from obtaining exactly the one they want. I look at this incidental change rather positively, I would however need more playtests to be absolutely certain, seeing how I never felt that Zeus was overpowered in the first place.
I loved the Divine Favours. They incentivise players to pick the god before Apollo, even though at times this had the unwanted side-effect of making that god more desirable than he should have been.
Like in the basic game the art is nothing short of exquisite. The undead miniatures and the Heroes look fantastic. If painted they could be easily used with other miniatures elsewhere.
I am very happy to see the contents of both Titans and Hades fitting inside the main game's box. For those of us that are as space starved as I am, that's good to see.
The weak points: Just like Kyklades: Titans, Kyklades: Hades exacerbates the space issue and starts being on par with the enormous Cthulhu Wars. Find a big space if you don't wish for your table to feel claustrophobic.
Depending on how you perceive drag, Kyklades: Hades can be seen by certain groups as an expansion that slows the game down. I will not suggest that a game that includes Hades will last less than the basic game alone; it will not. I however felt that the new options provide real added value and do not make the whole system unnecessarily complex. One must be thoughtful about how he allocates his resources because now there are more things to do. This however comes without falling on the pit-traps that other games do, like the imposition of pointless layers or complexity for its own sake.
A side-effect of the Necropolis is that once built, it reduces confrontation amongst the players who do not control it, or are not launching an expedition to control it. The reason is obvious; you are fighting against somebody, only for a third party to effortlessly collect money because of troops dying all over the map. Answers to that exist, of course: make the capture of the Necropolis a priority, or build it yourself (thus denying it from your opponent) when Hades appears again. I am not suggesting that the Necropolis is unbalanced or that it needs nerfing. In order to build a Necropolis, you waste the space and resources that would have allowed you to build something else.
I am uncertain about the fully random way in which Magical Items are acquired. Thematically, it is a flop. As much as Greek mythology abounds with devices that saved the Heroes 'asses time and again, these items were the results of long quests, or purposefully given by the a god to counter an expected situation. Here, Divine Favours leads to random hand-outs by three of the gods. I don't know how it should have been handled, but I know that it shouldn't have been handled that way.
There is no unifying concept behind the four different modules, be it one of theme or one of content. Some might be annoyed by this. I am not. Numerous well-established expansions have followed the exact same principle, like Catan: Traders & Barbarians for its respective line, not to mention how most GM Guides look all too often like collections of random articles.
In its effort to be multilingual the game has zero text on its cards and explains everything through pictographs. Bad idea; in order to find the cards on the reference sheet one needs to look on the imagery. The logical thing would have been to put the title of each card in Greek. Not only the cards would have looked less empty and awkward, but exposure to the theme would have skyrocketed.
As much as I like the art, there is a weird aftertaste in that it looks Asia-oriented at times. Hmmm.
There are no real rules about combining Hades and Titans in a balanced mega-game. Taking into account the changes they insert to the basic game, to my eyes it seems that the two are not to be combined, even though the publisher does not discourage anybody from trying. I do not like this sort of cop out.
Conclusion: Kyklades: Hades enhances the main Kyklades game in interesting and fully modular ways, one of which can be acquired free of charge if one legally downloads the free rulebook. It could have offered more for the price, on the other hand however all modules have something to say and speak volumes about the design effort that has been put into the basic game. Recommended, unless you absolutely dislike the basic game and prefer the rules of the Titans expansion.
To find out more about Kyklades: Hades and Matagot, take a look at http://www.matagot.com.
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