While the myths of ancient Greece bubble through the substrate of many board games – take Horrified: Greek Monsters, for example – there are surprisingly few that place them front and center. Narrow the frame to the way many people think about the age, one of conquest, bloodshed and warfare, and there are even fewer. Which might partly explain the success of 2009s Cyclades, a clever marriage of myth, wargame and more subtle strategic mechanisms. Now it’s back in a spanking new edition with some fun tweaks from its original expansions.
What’s in the Box
Aficionados of the original Cyclades might recall its big, oblong box, but this new Legendary Edition comes in a standard-sized square package that’s crammed with goodies. There’s no longer a central map board, which has been replaced by board modules that you can rearrange to make different maps of different sizes, depending on the player count. You can even flip them over for a more advanced map variant. The large board to track gods, monsters and heroes still remains.
There are punch-out cardboard strips to represent the gods, while the heroes and monsters get a deck of cards each, plus cardboard standees for those that move around the map. Other punch-out tokens include various buildings and upgrades for the map, plus a horde of cardboard coins. Most of this gets tucked away neatly in a treasure-chest like box insert with a flip-up lid, a smart extra design feature to help you organize and pack away the game.
Each player gets a screen, a pile of cardboard control tokens, and a mix of wooden army and navy pieces all in their chosen color. There are six to choose from, rather than the original five, plus a seventh set of gray pieces that represent mercenaries, another new inclusion in this edition. These are nicely cut, but nothing to write home about. If you want to make your game pop even more on the table, there are plastic miniature upgrades available separately for the troops and the monsters, plus metal coins to chink satisfyingly in your hand.
Rules and How It Plays
The original Cyclades was an early example of a design trying to weave together the chaotic combat that characterized American gaming with the more refined sensibilities found in Germany. You start each round with that more genteel aspect, bidding in an auction for the favor of one of the available gods, which will determine your available actions for the rest of the turn. Some gods are face down, so that there are only as many available as the number of players, meaning someone has to take the weakest – and cheapest – god, Apollo. Each round one of the face-down gods and one of the face-up gods gets flipped, so all of them get cycled through.
Not all the gods are created equal. The war god, Ares, allows you to recruit or move troops, for example, while wise Athena allows you to build universities and recruit philosophers, neither of which have any immediate effect but can, in time, contribute toward victory. To up the ante, the higher bid slots begin to jump in increments of two, then five, while players will still need to consider holding resources to pay for their actions, most of which also cost money. Finally there’s Apollo who, while free, does very little, allowing you merely to up the income from two of your provinces.
All of this means competition in the bidding can be intense, depending on the board situation, with winning or losing a particular god having a huge impact on the game state. It’s a fraught, exciting auction when there’s a lot riding on a turn, with various other considerations feeding into the bids. Sometimes it’s worth trying to outbid an opponent just to keep yourself safe from a land or sea attack. Sometimes it’s worth leaving yourself short-changed in terms of paying for actions just to corner a particular deity. It’s a dynamic phase, with plenty of interaction.
Winning requires you to control three metropolis pieces. You can gain these by swapping four different basic buildings, each of which is granted by a different god, or by cashing in four of Athena’s philosophers. One of the other gods, Hera, allows you to recruit heroes, powerful on-board pieces with special powers that can also be sacrificed for a metropolis. Mighty Ajax, for instance, counts as two armies and can be exchanged for a metropolis if you control seven land spaces. Which brings us neatly onto the last way to gain one: take it off another player via military conquest.
Warfare in Cyclades is short and brutal. In a contested land or sea space you tot up the units on each side together with the value of a dice roll with the loser removing a piece. Repeat until only one side remains. While the dice only goes up to three, this can still be a surprisingly swingy affair. Resources, however, keep a cap on the violence. Each player only has eight army and navy pieces and, of course, winning the bid for Ares is the main way to gain and move troops, all of which limits how many campaigns you can conduct.
In this edition, however, there are sneaky ways round these restrictions. Hera not only allows you to gain heroes but also mercenary troops, meaning you can expand on your paltry tally of eight. And all the gods allow you to make heroic moves, which essentially means you can move and fight with any army that includes a hero. This gives the game a surprising amount of maneuverability, clashing not only over valuable buildings but spaces that provide income, and makes heroes particularly valuable pieces to risk in a fight.
It also means turns that feature Hera or Ares can feel heavily weighted in terms of tilting the game state. And if everyone wants a piece of the action, that can very much be the case. Cyclades, however, is a game about taking the rough with the smooth. You can prosper without violence by taking cheaper bids on weaker gods and building up your infrastructure. But everyone around the table has to be okay with a game where your attempt to play economically can potentially be undermined by a burst of conflict. It’s all about knowing when to change tack, balancing the time to strike out with the time to shepherd resources, but having war and peace so close to one another in the same package can sometimes feel jarring.
Either approach can really benefit from mythological creatures, which you can purchase with any god other than Apollo, but more peaceable players are more likely to be able to afford them. They’re pretty powerful and so work as an effective balance against big bids on warlike gods. Most are one-shot effects, like the Satyr who lets you steal a philosopher from another player, or the Harpy, who destroys an army. Others, however, get a piece on the board which you can keep and move from turn to turn if you’re willing to sacrifice priestesses, gained by winning the auction for Zeus. These include horrors like the kraken, who simply wipes out all fleets in whatever space it enters. Pushing these beasts around the map is enormous fun, so long as you can afford the priestesses to do so.
