by Justin Bell

“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta?”

One of the rules we have here at Casa de Bell is absolute: if the kids want to play a game from the adult game closet, I always say yes. (There’s only one game off-limits around here: Voidfall. That’s because I’m not teaching it…yet.)

One of the beauties of having kids who are now 12 and 9 is that many of the games in the adult game closet are drifting into the family game closet. As the kids get older, it’s been such a joy introducing new concepts and mechanics that were a bit dense even two or three years ago.

The nine-year-old was the one asking about Thunder Road: Vendetta. He was interested for two main reasons: first, he wanted to play the base game with the Carnival of Chaos expansion, because he loves the arena-style nature of that expansion map.

The second reason is why he really wanted to play: my boy was hoping to have another chance to beat down his dad.

In our first play of Carnival of Chaos, he acquired a “Super-Weapon” called Li’l Sammy, then used said Super-Weapon to shoot down my chopper—normally, choppers are invulnerable—on his way to a dominant victory where he wiped out all my cars.

(Yes, TR:V superfans, you are correct—there is a different scoring system in Carnival of Chaos, tied to “scrap”, the in-game cash that can be earned for damaging opponents. However, my son and I are simple with our approach to this game—the score is all about car kills. He won that first matchup three eliminations to one.)

After his victory, my son spent the next few days gloating about his victory.

At dinner: “Daddy, can you pass me…the Li’l Sammy?”
Before bed: “Hopefully you can beat other players to make up for your loss to me in Thunder Road.”
Walking to school: “I kinda want to play Thunder Road again to see if I can get the Li’l Sammy card. It was so cool shooting down your chopper.”

And on and on. For better or worse, my kids like variety; over the next few weeks, they kept asking to play other games. Weeks turned into months, and while I had the chance to play Thunder Road: Vendetta with other adults during that timeframe, I didn’t break out the expansion again until last week. That’s when my son walked into the game closet, saw the handsome red all-in Maximum Chrome edition copy of Thunder Road, and remembered Li’l Sammy.

“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta? Hopefully, I can get Li’l Sammy again.”

***

After I finished up the work day, I set up the Thunder Road: Vendetta base game with Carnival of Chaos on our kitchen table.

I insist upon using the Choppe Shoppe expansion content. That’s because I—well, now, both my son and I—love using the crew leaders and the car upgrades. The leaders use alternate “command boards”, the dashboard that accommodates each round’s extra die to trigger powers like nitro or the chopper, with asymmetric powers.

My son selected Bumpo the Clown as his crew leader for this play, a spooky-looking character who reminds me of Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal car combat games on PlayStation. Bumpo’s power is fine—he can reroll the direction die when his cars move in a slam—but his command board includes the Bump power, which triggers on 6s and allows Bumpo to move the other car on the first slam that turn, even if Bumpo has the smaller car in that slam.

I went with Machine Gun Joe, Esq. to lead my crew. Joe has a somewhat overpowered ability (at least, in the eyes of the nine-year-old, who has a tendency to call everything “OP” if it is not his own powers) to reroll the shoot die once during every attack action.

While I love the crew leaders, the best part about the Choppe Shoppe expansion is the car upgrades. During setup, each of a player’s three cars get outfitted with their own individual powers. For this game, I had a couple of simple upgrades—the Boost Switch, which gave me a +1 on movement, and the Heavy Frame, which grants the assigned car an extra damage slot (three slots instead of the normal two).

But I also had the Onboard Computer, which allowed me to ignore the effects of damage tokens when I assigned it to my large car (The large car is always the one that takes the most damage). So while I would still take damage during the game, it wouldn’t turn ugly, like things tend to do during a Skid or a Blast-Off.

With setup complete, we got rolling. The way the Terrordome (whoops, “Carnival of Chaos”) works, players drive their cars from three different entry-point track pieces outside the arena directly inside, then spend the game navigating pop-up hazards in the form of traps known as “Killer Pillars” that can eliminate cars through various game effects.

Of course, there are other hazards like those pesky opposing cars bent on using all manner of Super-Weapons and their Choppe Shoppe upgrades to take you out. There are a bunch of ways to get wiped out in the ring, and in my experience, games of Carnival of Chaos are a little quicker than the base game, especially at higher player counts.

Thanks to six Super-Weapon tokens scattered around the board, players are always gunning for the best stuff in the game. And while both my son and I were hoping Li’l Sammy would show up so that we could build on its legend, both of us drew cards that represented a bunch of fun toys that we tried to use to take each other out.

Unfortunately for my son, I got my hands on the Super-Weapon goodies first. Sometimes, love is a beatdown.

***

My first Super-Weapon pickup was the BFG…no, not that one. Here, the Big Friendly Gun (complete with a picture of what looks like a big chain gun with a smiley-face balloon on top) deals an extra face-down damage token each time the gun’s owner shoots and hits. I used that to deal two damage to my boy’s small car (the Doom Buggy) on a single turn, making it inoperable.

The Big Friendly Gun made more friends later in the game, when I used it to shut down my son’s medium car, the Avenger. My boy fought back. He grabbed a Super-Weapon token that became the Laser Kebab, which can shoot from the front arc of its assigned car any number of spaces, not just the one-space range of spaces directly in a car’s front arc. He poked holes in two of my cars the next two times he had the chance during his turns from across the arena. Damage, yes, but no inoperable status plays or eliminations.

Slams of inoperable cars into Killer Pillars and a Blast Off that shot one of his cars into the arena walls got me to a place where I was running a 3-on-1 break for the rest of the game. (Thunder Road: Vendetta vets, be honest: isn’t it a blast to watch what happens during a Stunt Die roll of a Blast Off? Goodness gracious, it’s hard to beat those moments in any game!)

Later, I picked up the Auto-Cannon for one of my cars, which lets a player shoot, move, then shoot again. My final Super-Weapon pick-up was the Torsion Dynamo, which removes a car’s guns but guarantees that the opposing car always moves in a slam. (Putting the Dynamo on my small Doom Buggy made that puppy a force!)

None of that mattered though…because as it turned out, I found an opportunity to take out my son’s last car with flair, using maybe my favorite elimination method in the game.

On my final turn, I was able to slam my son’s final car, the Eliminator, forward one space…right into the same space as his chopper, which he had tried and failed to use on his previous turn to take out my medium-sized Avenger.

Any car that ends its turn in the same space as any chopper is automatically eliminated. My son grew up in that final moment, and took his defeat like a man, ending our run of chaos (ahem, Chaos, with a capital C), with daddy taking home a three-to-nothing victory.

Even though Li’l Sammy never reared its ugly head, my son and I had a blast. Chucking those dice and talking a little smack and kitting out our cars and trying, but failing, to use our choppers, nicknamed “Blue Thunder” and “Airwolf” to wipe each opposing set of cars off the grid…it was all kinds of fun, win or lose.

I love playing games with the kids. I’m loving the chances I have now to get in more plays of the games I prefer, creating more memories along the way. And, I don’t mind handing out the occasional beatdown, especially when I can avenge an earlier loss.

That’s because I know what’s coming. The kids love wiping the floor with daddy from time to time, and giving them more chances just means playing more board games.

by Rosco Schock

The design that became The Golden Blade was the first game I ever designed, and the first iteration of it was way back in the autumn of 2017. I should also be clear that I didn’t set out to design a card game version of Diplomacy; that just kind of happened along the way. I hope you will enjoy this story of how we ended up there.

Background
It might be helpful to first explain the original Diplomacy. Diplomacy was first self-published in 1959 and is a war game that contains almost no random elements. Each player is a Great Power in Europe prior to World War I, with the ultimate goal of controlling a majority of territories known as “Supply Centers” to win. Players must first negotiate with each other during a turn before secretly writing the Orders for their units. All the negotiations between players are non-binding, and it has a reputation as a “friendship killer” when one player betrays another to win. It was frequently advertised as John F Kennedy’s and Henry Kissinger’s favorite game. Diplomacy was inducted into the BGG Hall of Fame in 2025.

Origination
At this point in time, I had never played (or heard of, to be honest) Diplomacy. Although I had been playing a lot of the BGG Top 100 games for a few years, I never tried to design one all by myself… except for that one time in 2013 that I made a set of cards for some vague concept to fix a game we were playing that had people building a city with power level cards of 1/2/3. Fast forward to 2017, when a friend invited me to a monthly board game play testing event.

Luckily, I remembered that I had this set of cards at home in a box. The 1/2/3 cards I uncovered came in three different types of city aspects, and the idea was something along the lines of upgrading your 1s to 2s to 3s or maybe drawing them randomly, but the 3s were rare, and the 1s were common with the 2s in between. (Sadly, these city cards are lost to time, as is the game that they were meant to be a fix for.)

First Version
With the play testing event rapidly approaching, the pressure was on. I needed a game to test with friends before I embarrassed myself in public. I eventually settled on the concept that you built your power such that the first investment got you to power level 1, two more to get to power level 2, and three more to get to power level 3. This power grid concept in the game has never changed. The first person to reach power level 3 in any area is the winner.

As you can see in the image, I moved away from a city, and it became focused on being a country that was trying to win a military, political, or financial victory. Although I wasn’t cognizant of it at the time, looking back, I can see the shadow of influence in this game from 7 Wonders. The idea that your military power level only affected your left and right neighbors.

The missing piece was how to affect your neighbors and how to build your power. I don’t remember specifically, but cards that affect your hand or let your draw cards seem obvious – as well as ones that let you build faster or attack your enemies. Below are the first set of action cards. Looking at the structure of these cards, I can clearly see the influence of decades spent playing Magic: The Gathering. Type-specific cards and type-specific counters feel very natural in this context. Each turn, players would secretly choose one of these actions to play against their left-hand neighbor and one to play against their right-hand neighbor.

One of the pieces of the design that I’m most proud of is the action validity system. I had a thought early on that you can’t bring a knife to a gun fight. So what if you always had access to all your actions, but you were limited by your power level and the power level of that neighbor? What this means in practice is that if you have a power level 1 military, you can’t play military (red actions above) actions against a neighbor with a level 2+ military. Equal is okay, but if they are higher, you lose access to those actions on this side this turn. Even more so, this is separately true for all three areas of influence. Maybe you can’t play military cards on your right, but could still play political or financial actions there, and maybe you can still play military actions on your left.

Finally, I had a game to test. I was able to grab three friends for an impromptu test at my house, and the game played really well, especially given that this was the very first play test. Time to embarrass myself publicly!

Into the Deep End
The first public play test actually went well, and players seemed to enjoy it. My friend asked me if I had an Unpub (a play testing organization) slot for PAX Unplugged. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was ready to dive in headfirst. I went home and bought a ticket to PAXU, which luckily is only an hour train ride from where I was living. Steven Cole of Escape Velocity Games had posted on Twitter that he was taking pitches at PAXU, so I set up a meeting. Unpub was all booked up, but we met after hours, and I showed him my game with all the pride of my first child. Steven thought it had some potential but would need some changes to fit his product line. More importantly, he told me that he ran a monthly play testing group in Baltimore.

I now had access to lots of play testing to improve my game, and when Unpub Prime was scheduled for March 2018, I signed up for several testing blocks. Play testing with the public is a lot different than play testing with other designers. Throughout the weekend, players kept commenting that the game was kind of like Diplomacy. Later, while I was waiting for testers and talking to my friend (the one who launched me down this rabbit hole), someone walked by and asked about my game. I explained how it worked, and his comment was, “Oh, so basically Diplomacy, the card game. I remember someone asking me to design a version of that.” After he walked away, my friend said “Do you know who that was?” I was oblivious. He was flabbergasted. “That was Geoff Engelstein!” (designer of Space Cadets, Super-Skill Pinball and many more) Later on that weekend, I went up to him to see if he could remember who had asked him to create that design. He eventually remembered that it was Zev Shlasinger (of Z-Man and WizKids fame and currently running Play to Z Games).

Long Slow Wait
As I continued to test the game, I began to introduce it explicitly as Diplomacy: The Card Game. Most players saw a lot of the similarities, but one play testing friend from the Baltimore group named Jeff suggested that I was missing something. There wasn’t a way to betray other players. He had a point. I set off to design another set of three actions that required adjacent players to cooperate, or their action on that side did nothing. Besides the loss of the action you were banking on, there is also the opportunity to be attacked directly via your hand or your power levels.I also decided that these cards should be able to be played regardless of your power levels, since they require you to be vulnerable. Below is the first set of what later became the Promise cards:

Another card that changed during this time, as a version of Trade Pact moved out of financial and into the backstabbing set, was that I added a new card called Resupply to the financial set. Despite a card game already implying the importance of hand management, lots of players were being overzealous with University (Proliferation in the final version) and ending up card-locked. While Resupply only draws you one card, it also can never be blocked, so it can be a good choice if you think this opponent might try to play a blocking card this turn. It also lets you start rebuilding your hand.

One thing that became clear while testing – This game plays like a combination of Rock, Paper Scissors and a bluffing game, but in three dimensions at the same time. What actions does this player have access to? Which one are they likely to choose? Which side are they likely to play it on? What if THEY know that YOU know that is what you should do for an optimal strategy? In my experience, players generally have this same epiphany about halfway through their first game, and it usually goes something like “Ahhh, I get it now. I’ve made so many poor decisions. There are so many things I will do differently next time!” This is one of my favorite things when demoing this game.

I now had an improved and more Diplomacy-like game, and I was off to ProtoATL in 2019 (another Protospiel type testing event in Atlanta). One of the main reasons I wanted to attend was that Zev (with WizKids at the time) was also going to be in attendance. I met up with him and recounted my conversation with Geoff, and he remembered that it had been someone inside Wizards of the Coast (part of Hasbro) who had reached out to him and asked him to source or create a card game version of Diplomacy. This was incredibly exciting because if Wizards were already looking for this game, that would be one less hurdle to getting it published. He asked me to write up a document describing what was the same (familiar onboarding) and what was different (unique selling points). I also realized while talking with him that if I was going to keep calling it Diplomacy: The Card Game, then I needed to make it look more and more like the original. Before I sent him my document, I moved to a military, political, and naval victory as the goal. Blue made more sense as the Navy so the colors got shuffled around, too. If you are not familiar with the original, you control Army units and Fleet units around Europe as you compete for the win. I felt that Votes still captured the political capital you use during your negotiations with other players as you jockey for power.

I had a design where the flavor more closely aligned with the original. I came up with a list of what I thought best positioned the game for success: This is what I sent to Zev:



Zev sent the information along to his contact and we waited. Well, to be fair, it was probably just me. I’m sure he had far more important things on his mind than this. I would see Zev at conventions like Origins or PAXU and ask if he had heard anything, but he hadn’t. I do remain extremely grateful for the time and effort he spent on my behalf to get this game published. While my wait continued, the world stopped. Covid interrupted everything.

A New Hope
In 2023, it was announced that Renegade was releasing a new edition of Diplomacy. I immediately emailed Dan Bojanowski at Renegade and asked if they might be interested in a card game version. I knew that they weren’t going to have a booth at Origins, but suggested meeting up to demo it to anyone in attendance. He got back to me the next day, and we set up a time for me to demo it to Andrew Lupp (VP of Sales) and Thomas Haver (former World Champion and all around Diplomacy advocate/judge/tournament runner). Incidentally, and unknown to me at the time, Thomas was already working as a designer and developer of Diplomacy: Era of Empire, which is a re-imaging of Colonial Diplomacy.

We met at Origins and played a full three-player game. They both thought it had a lot of potential, and Thomas in particular wanted to play it with other Diplomacy players in his network. So I gave them my only copy and hoped for the best. This was a very exciting step forward in the process, and it was great to have an internal champion for the game in Thomas. He has always believed in this game from the beginning, and it would never have been made without his help.

In the fall of 2023, Thomas asked for a digital version to help expand his ability to test with other players. I hopped onto Screentop.gg and created a 3-4 player room and a larger one that would accommodate up to 5-7. However, things stalled a little bit after this. I know Renegade was working on Era of Empire as well, and I’m sure there was some discussion around how much appetite the community might have for new Diplomacy titles. The original has remained a classic for over 60 years for a reason, and the last thing anyone wanted was for any of these new titles to feel like a cash grab.

Dan reached back out in May 2024 and said they were internally discussing a Diplomacy card game again and wanted to run an online test. I did some cleanup of my digital Screentop implementations and was ready to go. In July 2024, we set up a play test with four people internal to Renegade. The playtests went great, and three days later, Dan informed me that they wanted to move forward. However, they first needed to get approval from Hasbro. The game was approved, and I couldn’t have been more excited! However, Hasbro had one request: The game needs to play 2-7 players because all the other Diplomacy titles have a two-player variant.

Home Stretch
Umm, how do you create a two-player game based on negotiation? The two-player variant for the original turns the game into a bidding game where players bid to create their initial positions on the map. One thing I decided from the start was that I wanted to find a way to make the two-player experience resemble the 3+ player experience as much as possible. Since negotiation was out, how do I create the same tension with only one neighbor? Additionally, I’d lost the ability to have players have different access to actions on the left versus the right since you have only one opponent. I decided that what if, instead of a single “conflict” being resolved on each side, players now had to fight two battles on each front? What action is on what side, and the order they resolve in, could create a space for a lot of mind games and second guessing. I had an initial version by December, but was still making tweaks. The big question was whether players were forced to commit each action to a single battle, or were they allowed to respond with either action in response or something else. I tried different versions of these, but they felt too complicated or too obvious. I finally settled on a system where each player had to commit to a vanguard action on their left, and they then “attack” either action their opponent had on this side. This added more bluffing and limited the complete control players had before. Below is the final version:

I created a two-player Screentop room so others could start testing this variant, and then Thomas and I were able to play it again at GAMA 2025. He liked what it was doing and thought we could pull in the France vs Austria name for this variant, which is already the name of a two-player variant in the original Diplomacy. It was also around this time that I got introduced to Marcus Burchers, who runs internal play testing for Renegade. We started running play tests at all player counts using Screentop and collecting feedback.

As we continued testing, one thing that became clear pretty quickly was that the two-player version needed some adjustments. Being only a few months old, it makes sense that it needed more development. While it should be clear that the Promise cards aren’t used with two players, I also chose to remove Invasion (later Stab) for a new card that blocked either type of action but came with a drawback. Part of this was so that there was a blocking card in all three areas, and I also wanted to see what cost players were willing to pay to block anything. As we started receiving feedback, one play tester had an interesting idea: what if Resupply drew cards equal to your power level for Fleets instead of just one? This was quite interesting, but I knew that would imbalance Resupply in the base game, so Convoy was born as the second action card that is swapped out for two-player games. Additionally, I had always thought that Espionage was slightly underpowered, and it dawned on me that this was the fix. It now lets you swap based on your Army power level, and it does that for all player counts. The two-player game was now feeling great.

Next up was fixing the rulebook. Like most designers, writing rulebooks is not my idea of fun nor my greatest skill. However, we all know how a bad rulebook can ruin a good game, so we set out to make it as good as possible. Additionally, Thomas was key in moving the flavor of the game to be maximally aligned with the original. We wanted seasoned Diplomacy players to immediately grok things as much as possible. Actions became Orders. Resources became Units. Deploy became Build. Destroy became Disband. Order cards were renamed to capture flavor. Then we started through at least 12 iterations of full document edits on the rulebook. Most of the rules of the game are very straightforward, but there are a few that can cause a bit of confusion, so we refined them often to get to the most concise and clear verbiage we could.

We also had to start making some component changes to keep the price point and box size that was needed. Initially, I used standard cards for the Units, but we had to move to half-size cards to lower costs and weight. Part of this is that to support a full seven player game, there needs to be quite a lot of the Unit cards so players don’t run out. If you look back to the original prototype, you’ll see that I used to have thin player boards to make the grid for each player's power grid. Those would be way too big to fit in any box. I worked back and forth with Dan a lot before we found the solution. Players now have six chipboard tokens that make the layout on the left and top to create the rows and columns of the power grid without explicitly having them designated. See below:

Final Thoughts
It has been a dream come true having this design get published, but it has been even more fulfilling watching people react to it in person. Thomas and I were at Battlefront: Dayton in the fall of 2025, and we ran the first-ever Diplomacy triathlon with The Golden Blade being the final game. I was running a pre-production copy, so no one in the group had ever played before. It was quite an exciting game. In the first two turns, players completely ganged up on the one very strong player and totally destroyed his hand and power grid. However, after that, they were all much more focused on their own plans. In the end, this player used Proliferate to claim a victory in the game on the last turn. That player ended up tied in the Diplomacy Triathlon event, which had to resort to a second tiebreakers to determine a champion. It was that close! Everyone involved had a great time.

Diplomacy: The Golden Blade even won the Ignis Award for best new game at the event! I’m looking forward to running demos and tournaments at major conventions this year. Come and join me and try this new addition to the storied Diplomacy franchise.

by Sandro Blasich

I've been designing board games for more than 10 years but it all started from fun. I had an opportunity to go to SPIEL Essen and I went and I felt like a kid entering the chocolate factory. I was completely blown away. I was there with a couple of guys that pitched their board games. So, I thought if they can do it, why shouldn't I at least try it too.

Thus I started designing more and more and I finished a board game that I wanted to pitch at Essen. That was in 2017. I had lots of meetings but I had no success. In my opinion, I had good games but nobody was interested enough to publish them. Little by little, I started to loose my enthusiasm for designing games and I told myself that I needed to take a break from game design but I couldn't, new ideas just came to me all the time.

Then, I designed a game just for myself. A friend saw it and he said that I have an excellent game. I didn't plan to pitch it but finally I did it and I signed the contract. However, it took several years for that game to be published (you will read about that game in my next designer diary).

Meanwile, a design group was organized in my hometown and we also had a panel discussion. That's where I met Vedran and we went together on the next SPIEL Essen. I didn't know that he was planning to open a publishing house. Then I showed him my prototype for Choconnect and he liked it. In 2024, he opened the publishing house Snovid Games and it debuted at SPIEL Essen with three games: Galebari, To be continued.. and my game Choconnect.

So, how did I come up with Choconnect? I often play board games with my two kids. One day we played the game Labyrinth and it crossed my mind that that game has an interesting mechanic which is very rarely used. Usually, I start with the mechanics and then I add a suitable theme when I design my board games. I was thinking what to do with that mechanic from Labyrinth. So, I thought of something like Connect 4 but different so that you put tiles instead of chips on all sides of the board and then you slide it so that everything changes all the time which means that you need to think ahead. And that's how the idea for Choconnect was born.

As the game is very abstract I needed to find a suitable theme and I though of my first time at SPIEL Essen and how I felt like a kid in a chocolate factory so a box of chocolates came to my mind. When I told my wife about that she happily approved since she's a proper chocoholic.

Choconnect is an abstract tile laying/pushing game where you are in the role of a chocolatier and you want to arrange chocolates in the best possible way. In Choconnect, you draw randomly a tile from the cloth bag (there are three different types of tiles) and you put it on the board. But the twist is that you can put a tile only on the outer part of the board and if there is already a tile you slide that other tile but it cannot go over the board. You want to make a line of chocolate tiles of the same type either orthogonally or diagonally. It depends on the type of chocolates (three in a row for dark chocolate, four in a row for milk chocolate and five in a row for white chocolate). Whoever succeeds in creating the line first wins the game.

Maja Benčić made a great job with the illustrations and graphic design so you have to be careful not to confuse my board game with an actual box of chocolates. Thank you Maja.

by Steph Hodge

This is the time for 2-player games! I have noticed a bunch of 2-player games hitting the scene in the past several years. I know I play a lot of 2-player games and am always on the lookout. Here are just a few more of those releases coming soon.

▪️ Bitewing Games (Zoo Vadis, Cascadero) has three new titles coming out that are for 2-players, which are part of their Mythos series! Bitewing Games has produced a ton of recent games from deisnger Reiner Knizia (Ra, The Quest for El Dorado... the list goes on forever), so I will start with the sharing about the new Collector's Edition of Ichor. [imageid=8195971 medium rep]
If you aren't familiar with the game, you are either choosing to battle as the Greek Gods or as the Greek Monsters. All of the figures have unique abilities, and you are trying to get all of your tokens onto the board before the other player.

About the new collector's edition:


▪️ Azure caught my eye because it has the wonderful artwork by Kwanchai Moriya (Food Chain Magnate, Under Falling Skies). Azure is an area control game where you want to advance on your track and reach the end before the other player. It will take about 20 minutes to play and has double-sided boards to keep the variety for replayability. More on Azure:




▪️ The third game I wanted to share is Moytura. This game can be played either competitively or cooperatively, which is interesting. I always love the option for cooperative mode. Moytura, is a battle for control of ancient Ireland over two eras. The game will be 45 minutes.

From the BGG game page:


▪️ You can also check out Iliad from the same 2-player series and designed by Reiner Knizia. This is also restocked with the other titles on the list. This was the first game of the 2-player Mythos series.

In Iliad, you will either be Hector of the Trojans or Achilles of the Greeks and strive to win the favor of the Gods by placing tiles and taking control of the grid.

More from the BGG page: