7 Wonders Duel Pantheon Review

Hot on the Achilles heels of our 7 Wonders Duel review comes the exciting new expansion Pantheon! Prepare your wallet as an offering as this expansion adds religion to our previously secular civilisations. Also, it’s really, really good!

Pantheon hits the table running with possible one of the most satisfying component additions ever:

Just look at how that halo-like board piece fits around the original board. God it’s so satisfying! I’ll tell you more about it later. Let’s just hope the rest is as exciting, hey? The next change to tell you about is the addition of these innocuous little tokens to the Ist age display:

What they do isn’t as immediately important as how you get them. Whenever you would reveal one of the face down cards with a token on it, you get to claim that token. Token collecting is good, thus this simple addition mixes up one of 7 Wonders Duel’s core mechanisms: revealing a face down card is no longer necessarily bad. What was an entertaining thing to manipulate before (trying to get your opponent to flip over cards) is now a challenging decision: do you go for the token even though your opponent gets to see the card first? It adds to the competing push and pull of different desires that made the base game so tantalising.

To help you make that decision, why don’t I tell you what they do. Well, each corresponds to a different family of deities from the ancient world, and collecting the token lets you choose one of the corresponding Gods or Goddesses to add to this game’s pantheon, meaning you place the card face down in one of the slots above that delightful new board. In the Ist age that’s all that has changed, but in the IInd age onwards players will get to beseech the Gods to use their powers.

This help won’t come free, however, and how big an offering you need to make depends on the position of the deity around the halo. The closer they are to you, the less you’ll pay. So picking up those Ist age tokens not only lets you choose which powers are available, you can also control how much you and your opponent will need to pay for it. But there are 5 Gods to place and only 6 spaces available so choose wisely.

In the IInd age there are a second set of tokens placed out that do something rather different: they make the Gods cheaper by 2, 3 or 4 coins depending on which one you pick up. It’s a degree of randomness that seems strange but I suppose it discourages you from always going for them: they’re a risk. The thing is these are placed in the far row of face down cards which means you won’t get to pick them up until late in the age. But you can pay to use the Gods (and Goddesses) from the very start of the round! Do you want to try and get a discount but risk your opponent grabbing the power you want…? There’s no right answer and that’s great!

So what are the powers!? Well! Let’s break it down!

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Ok, I’ve found the rules reference. Let’s go!

Right! These are the Roman Gods and there’s nothing the Romans liked more than a good old fashioned war. While Mars obviously gives an immediate two steps on the military track, I’ll just need to read the entries… for… the… others…

OK, facetiousness aside, the biggest issue with the expansion is that for your first couple of games one player will pick up a token, draw two cards from the corresponding set, and spend 2 minutes reading the rule book while the other player twiddles their thumbs. Then you’ll have to explain to each other what they do when all the cards are flipped over at the start of the IInd age. The symbology makes sense for the most part, but only after you’ve learnt what it means.

I mean, take Minerva above, obviously her power involves the red plastic gate piece included in the box, but what does it do? Well a look in the rules will tell you that you place it on a spot on the military track and it blocks that spot, meaning you opponent will have to get an extra military card to get past. But you wouldn’t get all that from the card alone without having played already (or read this review! So hey, I’ve just made playing this that little bit more pleasurable!) Thus it takes a few games to get all the cards out.

Fortunately, the array of decisions and choices that they add to the game more than makes up for this rules overhead: they’re really fun to use! Let’s take a look at the pantheon.

The Phoenician’s (whose civilisation included Carthage) are a merchant civilisation and thus their contribution is all about money. Astarte is starting a lovely new bank who’ll give you points if you promise to leave all the money with her. Baal is upset at having one too many ‘a’s in his name and a dress that doesn’t cover his nipples, so to make himself feel better will steal a resource card from your opponent. Tanit, meanwhile, is feeling very generous after winning the 7 Wonders Duel wet T-Shirt contest and just hands out oodles of cash.

The more refined Greek deities are a classical lot with Aphrodite just being worth points, Hades picking up dead cards from the discard pile, and Zeus, striking down cards from the structure itself! Which is a power that sounds much cooler than it actually seems to be in the game. But you can happily dump him in one of your opponent’s good spots.

The Egyptians are unapologetically obsessed with pyramids, thus all of their powers revolve around the wonders, with each being more ridiculously aggressive than the last. Isis with her Technicolor dream-wings is actually the most grounded of the lot: she’ll let you complete a wonder for free. Anubis is an angry wolf-man who’ll huff and he’ll puff and blow one of your opponent’s wonders down (yes, even the stone ones). And yes, I know he’s actually a jackal. Finally, Ra wins the award for biggest dick in the set: he’ll steal one of your opponent’s unbuilt wonders and let you build it, potentially letting you have 5 wonders and the pleasure of seeing your opponent’s face!

Finally the green deities of Mesopotamia are all about science, and presumably proving themselves out of existence. Very forward thinking for the oldest civilisation in the set. Anyway, Ishtar the rules-lawyer offers up a law symbol, previously only available from one of the science discs. Enki is all about dem discs, he’ll let you get one of two drawn from the ones left in the box. Nisaba has a pet snake, who’ll slither over to your opponent’s civilisation and sit on one of their science symbols, letting you count it as one of yours. Thus, with the Mesopotamians in play, a science victory becomes much more plausible.

Especially as the 5 deity cards picked in the opening age are not necessarily the only cards that will come into play. The set adds two new wonders, one of which lets you pick out a deity immediately (yes, you could do this in the first age!) and in every game the final slot of the pantheon is filled with the Gate card. If you take this (and it costs twice the normal amount) you can take one of the un-chosen deities and use their power, letting you perfect your plan once you are familiar with the options.

The final things Pantheon adds are the temples (super high scoring cards that replace guilds in the IIIrd age and can be bought for free if you have the right Ist age token) and some new science tokens that are, in the words of the great ancient philosopher Plato, “fricking awesome!”

One forces your opponent to lose a coin for every space you move the military marker towards them! That’s brutal! Another means that if a card could be picked up for free (because it has a chaining symbol on it) you can take it for free even if you don’t have that symbol in your empire. Incredibly nice for the final age. Both are crazy good, doing what science should do best: boosting some other element of your game. The only issue is that they seem better than the equivalent tokens in the base game. I love these powers, but I don’t want them to be the obvious choice!

All in all, 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon does what an expansion should do best: enliven the base game with more and new decisions, and make you look at old elements in an exciting new way. Pantheon does this will incredible style and might well be one of the best expansions I’ve played for just about any game.

 

Rating: A Perfect Fit

 

Our copy of 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can pick up a copy for £17.99 RRP from your local hobby store!