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Review of Divinity Derby
Blurb from the publisher: 'Ready to place bets on a race among mythological flying creatures?
Zeus invited you, along with a bunch of other divine friends from all around the Multiverse, for a little get-together on Mount Olympus.
After a legendary lunch and a few rounds of Ambrosia, the drink of the gods, you start arguing. Which mythic creature is the fastest? Is a Pegasus a better flyer than a Lamassu? Can the fire-breath of a Dragon stop a Phoenix?
You start making bets, and soon you decide that the only way to know who is right is to summon all those creatures for a good race... And soon the racing and high risk betting begins, with the Olympic 'All-Father', Zeus, as the ultimate judge.
Original mechanics make each game of Divinity Derby a unique experience - your hands of cards are shared with your neighbours, so you can decide how much to cooperate or compete with them, when playing those cards to move the creatures in the race; hidden bets allow you to bluff your way to victory; bets of different values allow you to pursue a safer, or more daring, strategy. Optional rules add special powers to each different divinity portrayed in the game, making the game even more wild and unpredictable.
Show your ability to evaluate the chances of each creature, choose the right bets, use your powers to influence the race to achieve your objectives. And don't worry about being nice to the others - they are also plotting against you to make you lose your bets...
Welcome to Divinity Derby!'
What you get: Your EUR 40 or equivalent will buy you Divinity Derby, a potentially asymmetrical, betting and racing game with hand management and bluffing elements that can accommodate from three to six players in just under an hour. The game was successfully kickstarted in 2017, gathering more than four times the requested investment. The ks offered both a standard as well as a Deluxe Edition of the game, with additional rules and content. The present review covers the game's market edition, which is identical to the kickastarter's standard edition.
In addition to the 12-page English rulebook that one can also download from the publisher's website free of charge, the game includes the following: 6 Creature miniatures and 6 miniature bases in different colours, 54 Movement cards (5 normal and 4 dirty trick cards per creature), 4 Zeus Protection cards, 66 Bet cards (11 per god), 18 Power of the Gods cards (3 per god), one board, 6 cardholders, 6 Fate tokens, 24 Creature tokens, 6 God tokens, and one First Player token.
Gameplay: Players incarnate one of six gods each (Anansi, Horus, Marduk, Odin, Quetzalocatl, and Yù Huáng), betting on how six flying steeds (dragon, gryphon, lamassu, pegasus, phoenix, sylph) will perform in a racetrack of 24 positions. The game's novel aspect is that a player shares a hand with his right neighbour and another hand with his left. Depending on the number of players, each hand has a different number of cards, namely from ten cards in a three-player game to six cards in a full table. A full game consists of a series of three distinct races. The points earned in each one are added up at the end of the game in order to determine the winner.
The first thing players do at the beginning of each race is bet upon one of the six animals before the game starts. Depending on how precise a bet is, it will yield more points at the end of the game. As an example, betting that an animal will finish the race either first, second or third, might earn you 2 points. If you bet however that it will finish first and nothing else, last and nothing but that, or that it will be disqualified, might earn you 7 points. When a player bets, the others can see on what animal he bet, but not the precise content of the bet. Once all bets have been placed, players take a second round of betting. This second bet cannot be placed on the same animal as the first bet. Out of the eleven bets that players have at their disposal, they use nine of them during a game.
The race then starts. When a player takes his turn he has to pick one card from the hand he shares with his left neighbour and one card from the hand he shares with his right neighbour. He cannot pick two cards from the same pool. Cards show the animal they aid, the fast value, the slow value, and a potential dirty trick bonus. The card that the player plays first applies the fast value; this is always higher than the slow value. The animal will move that many places on the board. If the player wishes to, when playing a card first, and if that card also has a dirty trick bonus, he can apply that bonus, by sending the card not to the standard discard but to another discard that might ultimately disqualify an animal from the race. The second card that the player plays will always apply the slow value. Each creature has nine cards, out of which there are four pairs of identical cards and one unique card. These cards overall are identical from creature to creature.
At some point during the game a creature will pass the mid-game range; this differs depending on the number of players. Players are then called to place a third bet, in the same process like before.
Once a creature passes the finish line, it climbs on the ranking track. Not all creatures might finish, the game however is played until all cards have been played. The final ranking is determined taking into account the position of the still running creatures at that point in time. The cards that have been used as dirty tricks in order to help a particular creature will be shuffled with the four Zeus Protection cards, and two cards will be drawn. If any of these two cards depicts an animal, that animal is immediately disqualified from that race, and the animals ranked below it will climb in that race's rankings.
Players then reveal their bets, and score points according to their results. A bet is either successful, and awards 2, 4, or 7 points, depending on its difficulty, or it isn't. Once all that is done, players set up the next race, until three races have been concluded.
The game includes three additional variants. The most unforgiving of them removes Zeus Protection cards from later races if these are drawn at the end of a race when determining whether a creature gets disqualified or not. In other words, in the second and third race the disqualification of a creature might be more likely than in the first race. Power of the Gods is a variant that gives three one-off powers to each god, provided a condition has been met. These powers are different from god to god. As an example, Anansi might change the creature he bet upon, swap his left pool with his right pool, or force all fast moves upon a creature to be considered as dirty tricks. Quetzalocatl on the other hand might increase or decrease a creature's speed, recycle a card that has just been used by trashing another one, or even eliminate all Zeus Protection cards from the deck when checking for disqualification at the end of the race.
The strong points: What a clever design! Divinity Derby has many things going on for it, and I don't know where to start from. Sharing a hand with two more players is ingenious, and more fitting to this kind of experience than card drafting/card passing. One can't possibly have full control over what happens, especially in the higher player counts. Yet, involvement is meaningful and the game is not a luck fest. Remember: this is more of a bluffing and betting game than it is a racing game. The creature you bet upon doesn't even need to finish in order to place itself in a position that rakes you points. There are dozens of tactics, some obvious and others not so: reacting on your opponents' bets during the three betting phases in order to have someone else fight your fights for you, spamming dirty tricks on animals that you would like to see disqualified, playing the wrong cards at the wrong time in order to confuse your opponents about the contents of your bet, and many more. You know what some of your opponents will ultimately play, and this might or might not suit your needs. The whole concept is that your are clever enough to let them play in the same way the cards that you would have also played, and play first the cards you suspect that your opponents would have used differently. Easier said than done, I know.
Themewise, the first game that I thought of while playtesting was the brand new Fired Up. The mechanics of the two games however couldn't have been more different, even though they are ultimately about betting on particular outcomes without a player controlling a specific contestant. Between the two, Fired Up is by far the meatier and heavier, and potentially the evening's main attraction. Divinity Derby is more of the easy to learn intro act, the game that will get you in the mood before moving on to more serious business.
I enjoyed the asymmetrical powers, even though they bring into the game a click more chaos that I would have enjoyed. If anything, the idea is that the game you should be played tactically and not strategically, with a touch of risk-taking and not hesitating to trust luck. If you are more in a party mode than in a warm up mode, do not hesitate to go all-in on the asymmetry.
The production values are excellent. The miniatures are gorgeous. They deserve to be painted, and even more so because they can be easily used in your fantasy RPG escapades. The game uses coloured ring bases. You can paint the minis any way you want without wondering about the colour of a contestant. The box could have been sturdier but it doesn't really need to, while the plastic insert is purpose-made. Everything fits tightly, miniatures and (sleeved) cards included. Absolutely no complaints here.
The weak points: Do not approach Divinity Derby as a racing game. It underperforms if you see it like that. It is not uncommon for no creature to cross the finish line, since that is not the point. The point is to rake the points depending on your bets, and to do so you need to be both clever and lucky. You don't enjoy luck in your games at all? Wrong game, man.
The more players the better, even though a full table inadvertently diminishes interaction. The reason is simple. You have your own goals, and you can try to guess what your neighbours are doing in order to potentially thwart them by using first the cards that you think suit them. Yet, this means that by definition you don't have much to do with everybody seated two positions away from you. In a six player game, this literally means half the table. To this, also add that full table games see one act less times, and increase the downtime. For these reasons, I felt that the game feels more manageable with four players, potentially even with five.
I am a bit perplexed by the two bets at the beginning of the game. Literally, one is betting without having information about the table apart from the hands that have already been revealed. I feel that a single, simultaneous revelation bet at that point, with a second bet at around one third of the game and a third bet at two thirds of the game would have suited its spirit much better. If bets needed to have a co-efficient, depending on how early or how late they were placed, the better.
While I was researching for the review, I was made to understand that the Deluxe Edition did not merely include better components, but also additional rules which could have been easily included here. In the most glaring omission, each of the competing creatures had a special power which does not appear in the version under review. WTF? We are talking about six additional cards with asymmetric creature powers that would have breathed even more versatility into the game. How can something as obvious as this be reserved for an alleged Deluxe Edition only?
No rules for ties? For real? Something as easy and obvious as 'the player with the highest value bet or bets', or 'the player that won the highest number of bets'? No? Is this amateur hour?
This might be the first game I know of for which a round table might be the optimal choice. Having a hand in-between players as opposed to in front of them is partially counterintuitive, and in long, rectangular tables it causes some logistics issues. That should hardly discourage someone from buying this game though.
Conclusion: Divinity Derby is an entertaining experience that can easily find its way to your shelf if you want a light game on the bet-and-perform concept. It has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, meshes chaos and tactics well, and provides quite the laughs in the process.
For more info on Divinity Derby and Ares Games visit its website at https://www.aresgames.eu.
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