First Impressions of 4 Gods

In the beginning there were 4 Gods: a god of the mountains, a god of the rivers, a god of the trees and a god of grass (he that was the most popular god and got invited to all the coolest parties). These 4 Gods got to work building the world from convenient tiles they drew from the bag of darkness, always ensuring no terrain was cut off unnaturally. They weren’t going to waste a whole week though. No! They were going to get this done as quickly as possible.

4 Gods is basically real time Carcassonne, with a few extra twists thrown in. You draw 2 tiles from the bag at a time and only once you’ve placed them can you pick up 2 more. They can only be placed in a corner, that is, they need to share two edges with existing tiles in the build area, contained within the starry expanse of the score track. Thus your world starts growing out of the 4 corners giving you a sense of your own little part of the world, but you are free to lean over and drop your piece anywhere, and lo! The interaction has begun!

Players are aiming to build large areas of their own terrain type. Also lots of separate areas of your own terrain type. So messing with your opponents or tying to introduce a bit of greenery on their mountains is actively encouraged. But there’s more: each God has their own band of plastic followers who can be placed on a tile you build to lay claim to an area, any area! And there’s an area control element too so two or more players can share a territory, or you can get two dudes in to win overall, so as soon as a large area starts building up everyone is looking to get in on it. Because this is all happening in real time too, it’s all the more tense and exciting!

4 Gods does a lot to mitigate the luck of the draw too. If you can’t find somewhere to place a tile (and there’ll certainly be situations where this is true) you can drop it down along your edge of the board. But you can pick tiles back up at any point, and you can also pick up from any opponent’s edge, but while you can return pieces to your own edge you can’t to an opponent’s. This opens up your options substantially later on in the game and there’s even the tension of not knowing what’s on the other side of a tile when you pick it up…!

It’s all really neat! There are cities you can build at any time, worth a massive 5 points! (5 points!) But they can be destroyed if an opponent can find a piece that would fit in its place, giving them the points and making building them a tense race to try and surround them with impossible terrain combinations while everyone searches for the piece to destroy them. You don’t actually start with a particular Godly allegiance, picking your faction at your discretion, inviting careful analysis of the game board… or just grabbing the player colour you like best as part of the game.

4 Gods does have some clunkiness: the game ends when the bag of tiles is empty, but not immediately. You have a couple of turns of the little sand timer to eek out a few more points, but everyone is focussed on the game board, not on the sand timer. It’s also very much on each player to ensure they don’t accidentally cheat, but mistakes will get made that you only come across while scoring. Though it’s kind of amusing to imagine four Gods looking accusingly at each other when they come across some crazy straight edge in the environment.

Fortunately these are little quibbles and don’t harm the shear fun this game offers! The real time element adds just enough chaos to make the game tense, but the central challenge of making your pieces fit is enough to have you thinking rather than throwing stuff down. Yet you still have moments where you just get your piece to a spot first, or you sneak a follower into a big terrain section unnoticed and that is so satisfying! 4 Gods: great fun!