It seems that more often these days “we”, at Board Games Critic, are announcing a new board game release every other week and this week is no different. The French games company Ystari along with the games designer Phillipe Keyaerts has come up with a brand new game which will allow players to build and control their own Greek civilization. Ystari were also responsible for the development of such games as Amytis, Bombay, Caylus and numerous others to boot. Most of their games center around the civilization type games which have only previously existed as digital computer games.
The Olympos board game is designed to be played for around and an and a half, obviously this will vary depending on the player, but that is the intended playing time. Like other strategy board games of it’s kind Olympos requires players to move around the map at their disposal conquering unoccupied or natively held territories. As in the digital form of this type of game, players can collect resources and choose what they want to do with them, they are also able to research new technologies to advance their own civilization.
The game employs a system of “lightning bolt” cards which are selected once a player lands on a corresponding space, the “lightning bolt” card will either help them or hinder them.
This game will likely appeal to those players who are already familiar with games from Ystari and those who enjoy playing civilization based computer games. It’s nice to see such a quality game in the form of a board game for a change, bringing people away from those ever more popular computer based alternatives.
