Lords of Hellas - Awaken Realms
This game is not easy to categorise. It works primarily with Risk mechanics. Each player plays as a different faction in ancient Greece. You vie for control of the Peloponnesian peninsula and pray for the favour of the gods.
Each faction is led by a supreme hero and are beset by the fabled monsters from Greek mythos. This is where the analogy to ancient Greece ends. This is certainly not Risk with a Greek skin. The world has been invaded an influenced by alien beings.
While all the heroes bare the names of heroes we know Odysseus certainly didn’t carry a sniper rifle. This meshing of futuristic sci-fi and ancient Greece works brilliantly. The majority of the impact is thematic only: the Minotaur didn’t need to have a bionic arm but it looks fantastic.
Many Different Games in One
There are three main games happening at once here. They all work well and complement each other. First you have your armies that fight for area control for your faction.
Second, your hero plays essentially by themselves doing quests and fighting the monsters. The heroes can impact fights between armies but unless this was specifically their thing it rarely felt let a good use of their time.
Third, you have priests that influence the god’s power in the world and unlock further actions. They kind of felt like a currency manipulator.
Balance
Combined with these three parts of the game are varied victory conditions. You can win through: area control; control of temples; control of completed statues to the Gods; or defeating monsters.
All of your decisions with each of your units can influence all of these win conditions. I really enjoyed the various paths to victory as it allowed for someone who had been unable to control their area of the map to still win through an alternate condition.
The flipside of this was that I felt it can be very difficult to ensure that you are in a position to stop someone else from winning. The reason for this is that you may have a strong army and be moving towards area control or control of one of the statues. So your opponent powers up their hero and takes the path of monster slayer to win. It is very hard to switch gears to stop them.
Does Ignoring the other Players lead to an Un-Interactive Game?
So from the few games I have played I found that you either want to play with a balanced approach – aim to be ok in all aspects or ignore what the other players are doing and go for your own win condition.
This doesn’t really lead to an un-interactive game. You will still have to fight for control of area or for the favour of the gods and your heroes may be fighting over the same quests. The interaction will be more an indirect result of your decisions rather than directly targeting the other players.
Intuitive Game Play
Once the game gets started the board looks very busy and like there is a lot going on. It isn’t really like that though. Once you have the basic rules explained you can quickly understand with a glance what’s happening.
When we came across things we were unsure of we would always check the rules. What I found interesting was every time we did this the outcome was what we had expected. The game is very intuitive and the mechanics work as you would expect.
Great Things About the Game
I love the overall aesthetic of the game. All of the pieces are superb. All of the different factions have different pieces – none of the basic troops are the same. They have spent a lot of time working on the quality of these models.
Another thing that is really good is that everything that happens in the game is represented by models. If you build part of the statue to a God you actually take the next level of the model out of the box and fit it onto the board.
Nothing is too complex. Each aspect of the game is just complex enough. While they could have focused on a more complex combat system for the monsters and the heroes this would have taken away from the other aspects of the game. It also would have slowed the game down considerably.
Bad Aspects of the Game
While the lack of complexity is good for progression of the game it does feel a little paired back, like in previous iterations there was more going on. This leaves you with the feeling “oh that’s it?” a little bit.
The impact of your decisions on the game don’t seem to mean too much in the mid to late game. If you have chosen a particular path and are unable to stop your opponent wining on another track you just have to race to win on the route you have chosen. Overall I feel that this is a bad aspect of a game like this.
On the surface the game looks like a war between the factions. But it isn’t this at all. This has its good and bad aspects it just isn’t what the game is about.
Overall Opinion
I’m a big fan of miniatures having played Games Workshop games for many years and the miniatures in this game are fantastic. I also love the way you actually build the statues to the gods.
When I pull out a game that is as ‘busy’ as this I expect for a lot to be going on, but the depth just really isn’t there.
The biggest downfall of this game is the mid-end game decision making and its impact on the game. Early choices lead to you playing a particular role in a story. At the end point of the game you really just play out that role in the story and don’t have much control over the outcome.
