Iliad

^{review by Kaleb}

Coming from the designer behind Lost Cities, Zoo Vadis, Modern Art, and 800+ other board games, Reiner Knizia designs another banger of a game with Iliad. Iliad is a two-player abstract strategy game, themed around the Trojan War. More specifically, one player plays as Hector of Troy and the other plays as Achilles of Greece, vying for the gods to be in their favor and win the war.

In Iliad, players take turns placing tiles on a chess-like board, with squares marked with either red or blue to signify the respective players’ colors. Each player has identical tiles with powers marked from 1-5, or the Dolos tile, which adds the points from the opponent’s surrounding tiles. Tiles 1-4 each have additional special abilities, such as being able to move an opponent’s tile to an empty space, or to flip over your opponent’s tile causing the point value to go down to zero.

Players are competing to win the most points in either rows or columns as, on the edge of the board, there are success tokens to indicate favors of the gods, additional bonus points, wedding rings, and even curses for negative points. Whoever wins a row or column, determined by the points marked on the tiles placed down, gets to choose which of the two success tokens they’d prefer, with their opponent taking the opposite one.

Once all the tiles have been played, the game ends. At that point, there are two “instant win” conditions: when a player has gained favor of all five gods represented and their opponent has not, or when a player has gained both wedding ring success tokens and has gained favor with at least four of the gods. If both or neither player meets these conditions, then a winner is determined by the point value of the success tokens added together, including any negative points.

While playing this game, I found myself switching strategies mid-game, and trying to block my opponent from taking specific success tokens. It is a fun and think-y strategy game, and I find the theming enjoyable and accessible. The rules are easy to understand, making it an easy game to pick up and learn to start playing immediately.

Iliad is available now from our webstore.