Yesterday we looked at Pillars of Fate, a kinda-sorta remake of extended family reunion simulator Veiled Fate, and found it wanting for much the same reason as the original. The gods are capricious, everybody knows that, but their fickleness doesn’t exactly make them the most appealing playmates.

But here’s the thing. At the same time Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon were designing Pillars of Fate, another remake was, um, remade. On a superficial level, this one, Scales of Fate, resembles its namesakes. As in those other titles, dueling gods intend to deduce the identity of their rival’s offspring, minimize their impact on the world, and elevate their own bastards over everybody else. Basically, it’s a race to promote your nepo babies over everybody else’s at the family tire shop. And that tire shop happens to be the eternal mountain at the root of the world.

And it’s excellent. Scales of Fate just might be one of the tightest, nastiest deduction games out there. That it was built for two players only makes it the more impressive.

But these are the ones standing on pillars…

For first-timers, the board presented by Scales of Fate is wonderfully labyrinthine. I say “wonderfully” because just look at it. It’s colorful. The pieces slot together like joined fingers. There’s a topography to the whole thing. You can tell the elevated pieces will be more important than the pieces seated a few millimeters below them. Even when I had no idea what any of these components portended, I wanted to know. Needed to know. Were they gears? Would my demigods traverse them? Veiled Fate presented its map as a wheel. Pillars of Fate offered three lanes. Both are fine. Good, even. But I’ve seen wheels and lanes before. A series of interlocked cogs and risers is something new. That’s a metaphorical depiction of a landscape if ever there was one.

In practice, Scales of Fate is surprisingly easy to get a handle on. Turns consist of three possible actions. One of those, while important, functions more as an exception, an occasional bolt of lightning, than as business as usual.

The main two actions, meanwhile, immediately explain the function of those wonderful cogs and pillars. First, a demigod can be placed atop a pillar to trigger its ability. Whether it’s to smite another demigod down to the underworld to cool their heels, obtain the loyalty of a servant, or… well, that’s it. Rather than offering a wide menu of abilities, there are really only two to keep in mind. Sure, there’s some variety within those categories, but they fall into camps rather than cluttering the decision-space with branching paths.

The second action has to do with those servants. Placed along the edge of the board’s cogs, they trigger the quests that will increase or decrease each demigod’s renown. But to understand what that means, we need to back up a bit.

A servant sends two demigods on important quests.

Okay, so you’ve fathered/mothered/sea-foamed two half-divine offspring. Their identities are determined in secret at the beginning of the game. Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.

You want to elevate your children. Doing so openly is a surefire way to attract the wrath of your co-pantheonists. So you work in secret. The problem is that every demigod’s current standing is shown on the renown track, visible to both players. When the game begins, all nine demigods share the middle space. That’s seven renown. Even before they’ve done anything interesting, your offspring are worth something by means of their divine parentage.

What will they accomplish? Rather than doing the obvious thing — say, by asking you to push them up the renown track — Scales of Fate makes a tantalizing offer. Your children score points in one of two ways. If they occupy the same renown space when the game ends, they score its value. If both are seated on their starting space, having neither moved up nor down, that means they’ll be worth seven points. That’s respectable. Polite. Not a bad score. But if they move to different spaces on the track, now they score equal to the distance between them. Ticking one child up a single space means their combined value is one point. On the other hand, if your children should do the twin thing by embracing entirely opposite ends of the spectrum, they’ll be worth a whole lot more.

This introduces a wonderful sense of risk and reward to Scales of Fate, not to mention fixes my hangups with Veiled Fate. In that game, players earned points for ensuring their holy bastard earned the most renown. But that made their identity almost trivial. Once any one demigod got too hot for their britches, everyone would work together to take them down a peg. It was simple. Too simple.

Here, their relative standing makes the family tree more tangled. With nine demigods in the world, they’ll be all over the renown track. But what does that mean? Are those clusters on the track actually siblings working in tandem? Are those gods at the farthest edges secretly growing into a hero-villain rivalry that will shake the foundations of the earth?

Each age provides new clues on your rival’s childrens’ identities.

Of course, this is a deduction game, which means there are tools for producing those deductions. Some of these tools are subtle. With experience, I’ve made a habit of watching my opponent like a hawk and marking whenever they idly touch a piece or linger too long over a move. More often than not, some correlation can be drawn over time, hinting at favoritism or resolute neglect. (Similarly, I’ve developed the habit of studiously avoiding my own offspring. This, I’m sure, is a tell in its own right. If I reach out to tentatively brush the pink demigod, Isabel, before pulling back like my fingers were singed by her presence, you can reliably infer that I have nothing to do with her.)

But the game’s more explicit tool is provided each age. Scales of Fate takes place over three rounds, each of which provides a different criterion that will be checked at the round’s end. Early on, for example, you might be required to inform your opponent whether you have any demigods out of play. That means they weren’t sent to the board, whether to trigger actions or because someone blasted them down to the underworld. Later, your suspicions might be confirmed by evidence of divine parentage for any demigod placed on a highlighted action pillar.

Crucially, these cards ask yes/no questions rather than demanding specifics. If you’re clever enough to ensure that only one of your two children meets the current age’s criterion, you can simply say “yes” to their presence without giving too much away. For example, one first-age card asks whether one of your children is still seated at four to six renown on the track. Saying yes is almost worse than saying no, especially if nearly all of the demigods have yet to make a name for themselves.

In the meantime, nearly everything adjusts their standing on the renown track. When servants trigger quests — the cogs that surround the action pillars — the surrounding demigods shift up or down. When sent to the underworld, another action will determine the place’s magma forecast, thus providing feats or humiliations that also adjust their standing. Every little detail matters.

Now that’s nice.

And we still haven’t talked about the game’s cleverest touch. Remember when I mentioned we would return to the question of your children’s parentage? Turns out this pantheon is rocking one big orgy, with all the problems it poses for any paternity/maternity/sea-foam tests.

In most deduction games, including the basic rules for Veiled Fate, holding a card means nobody else is holding it. In Scales of Fate, both sides have their own duplicate deck. Just because your children are Agamar and Saghari doesn’t mean your rival won’t have some personal interest in one of them as well. Maybe even both of them, although that’s unlikely. This adds no small amount of static to the ongoing deductions. When one of your demigods gets bumped off their current space, is that because your rival has figured out that they’re your kid and is trying to mess with you, or are they chasing an ambition of their own? Some of my favorite matches have featured duplicate offspring, and while this calls into question what’s so demi- about these so-called demigods, it’s a brilliant addition to a shared-control deduction game.

That goes for the entire package. To some degree, I wish I could play a version of this game that featured more than two players. The idea behind Veiled Fate was always one that appealed to me, and while it finds its best expression here, there’s a slightness to Scales of Fate that I wish would be transposed into a more robust framework. Of course, it’s entirely possible that this game only functions because its manipulations are so laser-focused. It’s generally possible to figure out your rival’s progeny. At least one of them. I’m not sure that would be the case if we had to keep an eye on three other players rather than staring down only one person.

Along the way, there are other little touches that elevate the experience. Like the game-breaking powers that let you smite anyone or swap two demigods, but subtract points from your final tally. Or the way the end-game deduction rewards a correct genealogical discovery but only penalizes you for not uncovering at least one of your rival’s kids. Like the board’s cogs and pillars, everything locks together into one elegant whole, resulting in a crystallized experience where nothing is out of place.

Chillin’ with the cousins.

Honestly, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Not only that Scales of Fate is this good, but that it takes such a novel approach to almost every corner of its design. From the non-literal map to the way it uses relative proportions to signify importance, both on the board and between renown trackers. From the clever approach to shared control to the way players might find themselves accidentally co-parenting a demigod. It’s achingly smart.

More than smart, it feels great to handle, to push around, to study a rival and mark down a clue. When I first saw Scales of Fate, I knew I had to figure out how those pieces fit together. The beautiful thing is, their inner workings proved even better than they seemed from afar.

A complimentary copy of Scales of Fate was provided by the publisher.

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Ah, Veiled Fate. It’s been a while since we encountered IV Studio’s game of spurious divine parentage. At the time, it was dearly close to becoming a favorite, but its shortcomings were sufficient that the possibility was as scuttled as my own Olympian provenance. Now the team behind the original game — Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon — have revisited the concept via not one but two separate titles.

Today, we’re looking at the one that recasts the whole thing as a lane-battler. What could possibly go wrong?

I think the lanes are the pillars.

The first time I played Pillars of Fate, it seemed like a stroke of genius. Maybe two strokes of genius folded together into an omelette of genius.

The idea is wonderfully simple. There are three lanes between players. Each lane has two separate scoring values. In all cases, one is higher than the other. Most of the time, the distance between them is so great that the lower range dips into negative points.

Into these lanes both would-be divinities play cards whose strength determines which side wins the contest. Obviously. So far we’re evoking, what, every lane-battler? What’s less obvious is that those cards also determine which scoring value the lane will trigger. Play feathers, the game’s symbol for its “light side,” and that’s the scoring that’ll be awarded to the stronger player. Conversely, a greater number of scorpions means the stronger player will earn the points on the “dark side” of the card.

To be clear, there’s no hard correspondence between “light” and positive points or “dark” and negative points. It’s entirely possible that feathers will spell negative points and vice versa. This introduces the first and most notable of a few graphical issues. Namely, that the points themselves are not color-coded. Whether feather or scorpion, light or dark, positive or negative, the points are rendered in the lane’s neutral hue. In our experience, it’s a missed step that bore rotten fruit on more than one occasion, making the lanes that much harder to read. And, in some cases, to reach the conclusion of a round and realize we’d made an early misstep in our understanding of a particular lane’s stakes.

Oops. Oh well. That’s on us, I suppose. Back to the grindstone.

Most cards are simple: strength and suit.

Over the course of three rounds — more epically entitled “ages” — those spills of positive and negative points veer back and forth. Sometimes you win a coup, others you find yourself toppled from heav’n’s lofty pillars.

Again, it initially feels genius. There’s room for subtlety. Each lane can accommodate a face-down card per player, allowing both sides to conceal their motives. Is your opponent trying to win that lane with their best cards, or nudging it toward a negative scoring value in the hopes that you’ll invest all your strength there instead? Most cards are straightforward strength values and feather/scorpion icons, but their possible range — as low as one strength, as high as nine — is enough to ensure some major swings.

And then there are the demigods. There are twenty of these special foil-embossed cards in all. (Although only their backside is so visibly rendered, another misstep of design that makes them a little harder to pick out from the crowd than I would have preferred.) Both players receive three at the beginning of the game, and then, after swapping a couple, can only deploy one per age.

As you might expect, the demigods are potent indeed. There’s the Mother of All, a real jerk who awards ten points if you lose all three lanes in an age — a blow that’s significantly lessened if by “losing” you really mean “your opponent just received thirteen negative points.” Or Naka, a demigoddess who has to be played face-up, but allows your other two lanes to hold two face-down cards instead of only one. So much for your rival’s headspace. Others are dead simple, like Vesper and Penance, both of whom have zero strength but so many feather or scorpion icons to single-handedly determine the status of a lane.

Despite this potency, not every member of this demipantheon is equivalent. Some cards are harder to utilize than others, and how. One, Hadria, dings your opponent five points if they win that lane, but boasts a hefty seven strength, forcing you to measure your other deployments carefully. The Steward alters the scorpion/feather composition of lanes bordering his holy self, but not by very much. These cards are still powerful if deployed smartly, but can also threaten to detonate in your face, making them as mercurial as Hercules was a family man. (Too soon?)

Demigods upend the usual rules.

This probably sounds good. Smart. Possessed of a spirit of genius. It did to me as well.

But there are problems, and not all of them are as minor as the game’s graphical omissions. Take, for example, the way cards are parceled out. Both sides have an identical deck of 32 champions, the little non-demigods that make up the bulk of your army. As noted earlier, the range on these cards is extreme. Some have strength as low as one. Others stretch up to nine. And while there’s some correlation between a card’s strength in battle and its capacity to manipulate the value of a lane, this isn’t always the case.

Put another way, Pillars of Fate is unusually subject to the vagaries of the draw. Missing out on a high card or two can prove disastrous. And that goes double if you find yourself poorly armed and holding the first-player token. Because let me tell you, going first in Pillars of Fate is the pits. Every turn leaks another crucial missive to your rival, letting them play reactively and with such precision that each and every one of your moves becomes Sisyphean. Play a card, watch it get countered. Play a card, watch it get countered. Fill a lane, watch your opponent take their sweet time responding. Really, you’ll almost certainly fill all three lanes in advance of your opponent. This often proves disastrous.

And there are none of the mitigating systems that have found their way into other lane-battlers. There’s no ability to withdraw a bad hand, as in Jon Perry’s Air, Land, & Sea. John Clowdus’s Omen: A Reign of War fills its war-torn cities with so many special units that they’re effectively all demigods, producing wild swings that can’t be entirely countered. Even The Old King’s Crown, itself a freshman design by Pablo Clark, understands this problem, asking players to assign cards to their lanes simultaneously rather than let trailing players repeatedly one-up the leader.

The result is a lane-battler that feels bad as often as it feels brilliant. That makes its face-down cards such potential swings that they’re agony to reveal at the age’s conclusion. That generally goes to whomever held the first-player token least. Somebody will, by the way. Hold that accursed token the least. The game is three ages long, remember. Even something as small as a fourth age might have mitigated the worst of the game’s imbalances.

The components are lovely.

To be clear, these issues don’t ruin Pillars of Fate. The game’s smartest touches are still present and accounted for. In particular there’s the way lanes can be manipulated to turn a rival’s momentum against themself, the points-tallying equivalent of judo. Oh, you’ve deployed your most strong-armed champions to this distant battlefield? Oops, the only prize here is a cornucopia of spoilt meat. In those moments, the game shows itself at its most devious.

At some level, I even feel the same way about the demigods. I wish they had been a little more level, ability-wise, so that some weren’t such obvious picks compared to their siblings. But the game’s restraint in only allowing one per side per age is noteworthy, keeping the contests a little tighter than they might have been otherwise. Sure, the huge gap in their strength — in all units’ strengths — makes outcomes a little harder to preempt and keeps the game’s fickleness intact. But when things are going right, those become strengths rather than frustrations. It’s just hard to know which way the game will go.

My greatest reservation, really, is that there are so many excellent lane-battlers right now. I’d rather play any of the titles I mentioned earlier. I’d rather play Compile. I’d even rather play Riftforce or An Empty Throne. It doesn’t help that Pillars of Fate somehow misses out on its predecessor’s potential. You aren’t a god pushing around progeny. You’re a big dude with an army of your own. That’s fine enough, but as another stab at what made Veiled Fate so interesting, it travels toward an entirely separate heading, and a much less interesting one at that.

Okay, here’s one way in which Pillars of Fate recaptures that spark. If you remember Veiled Fate, you might recall that sometimes its contests were determined by the flip of a coin or the turn of a card. There are no coin-flips in Pillars of Fate, but the wildness of those champion decks and the testiness of its demogods often results in a similar caprice. After all this time, one’s fate might still hinge on whether they’re holding the right cards. And a first-player token.

In the early stages, most cards tend to be concealed.

Here’s the good news: Pillars of Fate isn’t alone. Its sister title, Scales of Fate, offers another attempt to make good on the promise of Veiled Fate. We’ll take a look at that one tomorrow, but I’ll tip my hand right now: that one got it right.

As for this one… well. Despite its flashes of brilliance, sometimes even a genius can prove more trouble than they’re worth.

A complimentary copy of Pillars of Fate was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)