Stonehenge has always been a mystery, its original purpose lost in time. Titanic Games asks the question: what would five world-class game designers make of such a location if they were the ones to discover it?
Titanic Games presents the world's first Anthology Board Game. They have gathered together five talented game designers and given each of them the same board and pieces. Five unique designers resulted in five unique games: an Arthurian showdown by Richard Borg, a monumental fire sale by James Ernest, a druidic election by Bruno Faidutti, a magical convocation by Richard Garfield, and an alien chariot race by Mike Selinker
Auction Blocks, by James Ernest: James is a droll cat, and so it's not surprising that his game is about selling off the rocks of Stonehenge one by one. Those monoliths have been blocking the locals' view for a long time, and it's time to sell them off cheap. James starts the game by placing coloured rocks around the outer ring. An auctioneer pawn moves around the board, offering the rocks for sale one at a time. There's a delightful bidding mechanic based on colour, and as you accumulate more stones of the same colour, the higher your score will be for each rock you get. There are some lovely tricks in this game. One nice twist is that when you win an auction, you get no new cards. So you can peak early, and then spend several turns wondering how all your friends are zipping ahead of you. Everything fits together nicely for a very German-style bidding game experience.
The High Druid,, by Bruno Faidutti: Bruno's game focuses on a druidic election. Using bars, the outer ring is divided into seven colleges. You take turns placing your druids into colleges or moving the bars that define the colleges to change their constituencies. At the end of the game, you get points for the druids in each college - if you have the highest non-tied number of druids in that college. That "non-tied" business makes for some very bizarre decision-making. Sometimes you want to invest your druids in a college, and sometimes you want other people to fight over it so you can win. It's a real brain-bender of a game.
Arthurian Ghost Knights, by Richard Borg: Richard wanted to design a war game, but there weren't any obvious historic battles near Stonehenge. However, there is the great legend of Loe Bar, a nearby hub of ley lines where a ghostly army of knights supposedly appeared in 1936. Richard adapted that legend into a conflict between long-dead Knights of the Round Table who come forth in the darkness to struggle over Stonehenge. His game involves placing knightly guards at the trilithons, working to gain majority control over the stones. The more control you get, the further your knight advances on the glory track. The trick in this game is the struggle round, where you can go from controlling your destiny to controlling nothing at all. In the course of the game, you place swords on the altar stone. When a struggle round occurs, you can use your swords to supplement your guards, or to kill your enemies' guards. But if you go crazy using your swords, you'll have no defenders when the next struggle round occurs.
Richard Borg's game is probably the most complex of the five in the box-although all of the games are simple enough that the rules for each take up only a single two-page spread in the rule book.
Chariots of Stonehenge, by Mike Selinker: Mike Selinker went back to historian JG Gurdon's cockamamie theory that Stonehenge was built as a racetrack for chariots and merging it with Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods to produce a game about alien chariot racing. You get a chariot with a telekinetic beam on the front, which you use to knock stones into the paths of your opponents. That, (Mike figures), is why the rocks of Stonehenge are in such disarray today. When playing this game, I'm often surprised how frequently a player finds himself skidding around-or even into-a rock wall, and I'm especially surprised that that player is usually me. Being overly aggressive with speed in this game will smash you into a conveniently placed trilithon, but being too careful will leave you in your opponents' alien chariot dust.
Magic of Stonehenge,by Richard Garfield You play a wizardly druid trying to cast a spell to raise up one of the trilithons from the earth. This requires getting your apprentices onto the board. You can play them into certain spaces using numbered cards in a bid, but quite often your best plays are countered by someone playing a trilithon card, nullifying the bid. So it becomes a bluffing game - is a player playing a high enough card to get on the board, or using her trilithon card to thwart you? If you lose a bid, however, things can get ugly fast. One of your apprentices needs to move down the board by the number of spaces you bid, and if they have to move below the first space, that apprentice gets sacrificed. So playing a high bid can get you on the board, or it can knock you off the board.
Those are the five games in the Stonehenge box. But there are lots more to come. New designers are already working on games for expansions and for magazines. You can even design your own game. Keep an eye on the
Stonehenge Library for new games using the Stonehenge omponents.
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