Vikings have landed in Greece, setting off a conflict between the pantheons of Greek and Norse gods. As demigods, you will play a role in these clashes of the gods, shaping the landscape.
What Is Divinus?
Divinus is a tile-laying legacy game for 2 to 4 players, ages 12 and up, and takes about 45–60 minutes to play. The game has 12 scenarios to play through, after which you can play in “eternal” mode. Divinus retails for $69.99 and is available in stores and directly from Lucky Duck. The game requires a free companion app (available for both iOS and Android). The theme involves a war between Greek and Norse gods and has a lot of mythology-inspired stories; there are stories of battles and war but similar to what kids may have already read in mythology books.
Divinus was designed by Filip Miłuński and published by Lucky Duck Games, with illustrations by Matijos Gebreselassie, Ferdinand Ladera, Karolina Nazakato, Wilson Nugraha, Anna Perci, Rio Sabda, and Cezary Szymański.
Divinus Components
Since Divinus is a legacy game, a lot of the components are in boxes and will be revealed over the course of the campaign. I’ll try to avoid most spoilers while still giving you some sense of the types of components included and their quality, which means I will show some of the components and stickers and refer to some of the story, but will avoid giving specific details.
Here’s what you first see when you open the box:
- Game board
- 12 Scenario boxes
- 78 Map tiles (39 with sacred places on back, 39 with factions on back)
- Tartarus box
- Sticker Sheets envelope
- 4 Demigod boxes
The game board is double-sided—the back side is for use with an expansion. The background illustration shows Greece on the left, with Mount Olympus floating above, facing off against Viking ships and a mystical Norse portal on the right. (Sorry, I don’t know my Norse mythology as well so I don’t know the name of it!) There are lots of spaces outlined on the board for the various tiles and cards that will be used during gameplay.
The scenario boxes are tuckboxes, labeled on one edge with a Roman numeral representing the scenario number, and they have different thicknesses. The majority of these hold a few cards that you’ll use for that scenario, but there are a few other components included as well: some stickers and meeples, for instance, that will be explained when you get to those parts of the game.
The Tartarus box is a larger box with a lid, and it’s where you put cards that have been “permanently” removed from the game. You don’t tear them up as you do in some legacy games, because there’s a chance that they may be re-used in the “eternal” mode after you complete the campaign, but basically things that go into this box are gone for the duration of the campaign.
The demigod boxes are larger tuckboxes, each with a character portrait and a few empty spaces on the front and back. There’s a spot to write your name (or your character name), and then spaces where various stickers will be placed as you play.
Contained in the demigod boxes are 24 dice, 6 per player. The dice pretty large, chunky dice with numerals on them rather than pips.
The sturdy envelope contains about a dozen sticker sheets, and there are two types of stickers. Some of them—like stickers that will be added to the rulebook as new rules are unlocked—are regular stickers, intended to be permanent once applied. The rulebook has huge sections and even entire page spreads that just have blank boxes with reference numbers, ready for new rules. It also has several pages in the back with more details about specific cards, icons, etc., with a note not to read those sections until you’re directed to. I did feel like some of the pages could have just been marked with a “do not read until” notice rather than having page-sized stickers to apply later, since that’s just more materials and makes those pages extra thick.
The more interesting sticker types are the ones that will be applied to your dice and to the tiles and game board. The stickers themselves are thicker, almost like cardstock, and the sticker backing is a transparent plastic. I’m not sure exactly what sort of adhesive these use, but they’re intended to be removable later—for instance, you can modify your dice when you earn stickers, and later if you want to change a face that already has a sticker on it, you remove the old sticker before adding the new one. For the most part, these stickers have worked as intended and we haven’t had a problem with them coming off accidentally; we did have some larger stickers that were applied to the main game board that started curling and peeling up on the corners a few scenarios after they were applied, though.
The game uses a mix of regular-sized cards and half-sized cards. There are also a few meeples (including a larger meeple to mark the first player) but most of those don’t appear until a few scenarios in, so I won’t give much more detail other than to say that they have a nice amount of detail and have both color and shape differences to tell them apart.
How to Play Divinus
Divinus is played over the course of 12 scenarios, and scores will be accumulated and tracked by the app over the entire campaign.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to win favor with the Greek and Norse pantheons; the player with the most favor in each pantheon will also be that pantheon’s favorite, which can confer certain bonuses for the next scenario.
Setup
Set up the game board by shuffling each of the two tile stacks separately, placing them in their designated spaces on the board, and then revealing tiles to fill the 12 numbered spaces on the board. The spaces on the left (1–6) are filled with the tile stack on the left, and the spaces on the right (7–12) are filled with tiles from the right. Tiles are marked on the back with a player count—if you have fewer than 4 players, you will remove some tiles from the game.
Each player gets their demigod box and dice. Note that depending on the player count, you may not use all of your dice. Everyone rolls their own dice to form a dice pool.
That’s the basic setup—but the app will also give you further instructions based on the scenario. For instance, in every scenario there will be a clash of gods and some quests; the god cards are placed in the spaces below the tiles on the left and right, and the quest cards are placed across the top center area of the board.
Gameplay
On your turn, you either explore (spend dice to get a tile) or rest (take all your dice back and re-roll them).
To explore, you may use any number of dice from your pool, adding and subtracting the values, to make a number from 1 to 12. Place your dice on that space on the board and take the tile, adding it to your map.
Your map has maximum dimensions of 4×4, and whenever you place a tile, it must connect to an existing tile (after your first one), with the terrain types matching up. There are three terrain types: water, plains, and mountains. In addition, there are some symbols on the tiles: factions that represent Greek, Norse, and Barbarian warriors, and some swirling ovals surrounded by crystals, which are sacred places.
You are also allowed to overbuild, stacking a tile on top of another tile, as long as it still matches all of the terrains connected to it. Each spot on your map may only be overbuilt once.
In each scenario, the gods have specific scoring requirements and will award favor to the top two players who meet those requirements. There are also quests, which will give favor to the first player to achieve them. For instance, in the first scenario, the three quests (shown above) require you to collect 3 of the same faction symbol on plains terrain on your map. Completing a quest usually also triggers a story element in the app, letting you add a location sticker to a map tile. In future scenarios, when anyone explores a tile with a location sticker on it, they can scan it with the app to continue the story, and it will give rewards to the player who explored it and the player who initially established the location (by placing the sticker).
If you cannot claim any tiles with your dice or don’t want to, you can rest: take all of your dice from the board and any left in your pool and re-roll all of them. If you removed dice from the board, refill those spaces with tiles from the corresponding tile stacks.
As you play, you use the app to keep track of various things—for instance, when somebody fulfills a quest, there is a spot in the app to mark that, which will then provide a little bit of narrative and some rewards.
Game End
When a player fills their 4×4 map, you finish that round so that everyone has had the same number of turns total. The game also ends if everyone rests two times in a row (though this is rare). Use the app to indicate that you’ve completed the scenario.
Favor awarded by the two pantheons are tracked separately, so you will end up with two scores, one for each pantheon. Score as follows:
- 1 favor if you completed your map
- 2 favor for the player who completed each god’s requirements the best
- 1 favor for the 2nd place player for each god’s requirements
The player with the highest total favor wins, though each pantheon also will announce its favorite—the player who had the most favor specific to that pantheon. (Note that you cannot be the favorite of both pantheons even if you have the highest score in both, in which case you will have to choose one.) As the campaign progresses, there will be other things that will score favor.
Why You Should Play Divinus
Lucky Duck Games is known for its hybrid digital-analog games, like Chronicles of Crime and Destinies. Many of these make use of your device’s camera to scan cards or items, but the app also contains the story itself. In Divinus, the camera is optional (you can just enter the location sticker number manually if needed) but the app tracks a lot of other necessary information for the game. Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, is the narrator for the game, and much of the story is told by her (and the voice narration is pretty good, too), but there are also times where you’ll hear from other gods of the two pantheons.
Aside from keeping the scores for each game and the overall campaign, the app also remembers things like who completed a quest to establish a location, and it’s the only way to find out things like sticker rewards. The cards themselves tell you how much favor you will gain for meeting requirements, but anything that relates to getting new stickers is hidden away in the app, only revealed when it’s time.
While the basic game that I’ve outlined above is fairly simple, each scenario includes a different pair of gods, each with their own particular requirements to meet, plus new quests to complete—and generally you only have that scenario to complete the quest or it goes away to Tartarus. Later scenarios had secondary gods as well, giving you more scoring options but also pulling you in multiple directions. While there is an overall score for each game, there are benefits to focusing on either Greek or Norse favor so that you can become the favorite.
The tile-laying part of the game is an interesting puzzle. You get bonus points if you can complete your grid of 16 tiles, so generally players will want to explore if they have any dice left that will add up to an available number. However, because of the quests and the gods’ scoring requirements, sometimes you really don’t want to take the tiles that match your numbers. Or it may be that placing a tile will leave a space that is much harder to fill later on. As the campaign progresses, though, players gain access to artifacts and other game mechanics that let them manipulate things to their advantage, whether it’s affecting the numbers on the dice or rearranging map tiles.
Although you’re each building your own map and can’t really mess with somebody else’s map directly, there’s still a good amount of player interaction because of the shared tile market, as well as the competition for favor. Since everyone’s unused dice are public knowledge, you can look around the table and see what possible numbers everyone has. If you look around and see that the next two players each only have a single “3” left, taking the “3” tile means that they’ll have to rest instead of exploring. If a quest involves collecting tiles with Greek faction symbols on mountains, that makes those tiles more sought after. Ultimately you often try to strike a balance between tiles that will make your map easier to complete and tiles that help you fulfill other quests or requirements.
We are currently about halfway through our campaign, and I can tell from the rulebook that we still have a few more mechanics to unlock, but the rulebook is close to complete—and there are still a whole lot of stickers left on the sticker sheets (but I try not to look at those too closely). The one joke we made about Divinus was that it’s The Sticker Game. There were a couple of scenarios near the beginning where new rules were still being introduced where I would spend several minutes consulting the app to find all the new stickers to apply to the rulebook before we could start playing. Now, I usually fire up the app ahead of game night so I can check if there are long lists of stickers that need to be found before we can start playing.
If you enjoy map-making and tile-laying games, Divinus is a cool spin on them with a good amount of story woven into the game, as long as you don’t mind a game that has you referring to an app throughout the session. Divinus makes good use of the app for tracking certain things and making some of the rewards a surprise; it probably would have been possible to make a totally analog version, but it would require a hefty storybook and rules appendix to replace the app.
I’m curious to see where else the campaign takes us, and I know there are already two expansions: Shadow of Yggdrasil, a Norse-themed prequel that makes use of the back of the board, and Pandora’s Box, a Greek-themed expansion with a few standalone scenarios. There are also recharge packs available in case you have played the campaign and want to reset it. Because the game uses glue-free stickers for the playing components, a lot of the components can be cleared off and reused.
To order a copy of Divinus, visit the Lucky Duck Games website!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
