Testing Out: Mystic Battles: Pantheon Game

       One of the great things about wargaming and the internet ( or social media) is that there are constant games being updated and new games arriving on the scene. A big chunk of these games have been driven by Kickstarter. Kalissa and I try to keep up with the various games that are upcoming, but I can have the attention span of a squirrel if I am let loose on the miniature world! We, also, have our busy life. This causes us to miss out of somethings, even if we know about them. In this case, it was Mystic Battles: Pantheon.
     We knew of the Kickstarter for the game a while back, but did not fund it. I think we may have had something going on around then? Ah, yes! We had just bought a house! So we skipped out on the Kickstarter, despitte being interested in the really nice miniatures that come with. However, after seeing painted figures showing up on Facebook, Kalissa and I turned to eBay and bought the core box set for about $150. For us, it was a worthy buy, since we already play Osprey's Of Gods and Mortals. This will just add to the figures  that we can use. The only one I did not like the looks of was the Hydra. However, we will get to that further down this post.
 

       Kalissa loves Greek Mythology even more than I do. I took about 20 seconds for her to decide to get this game. I think my opinion made it somewhere in there. This happened to be a purchase before we went off to this year's Siege of Augusta 2018. The plan as long as the delivery permitted was to have the game show up right before we ventured off to our convention. As luck would have, it made it on the day of our travel. We opened up the box to check things out, and off we went taking it with us to the show, despite barely having the room in a Jeep Liberty. It was mentioned that we might not need everything for the three Bolt Action Tournaments to help fit. We got it in. When, we arrived in Augusta, GA, that is when we decided to play a game. So as a quasi review, we tried out the demo scenario to learn to play.
    The Pantheon Core box came with 4 Gods, 4 Monsters, 5 Heroes, and 24 troops. It has six scenarios that are three boards that fold nicely and are two sided. They came with there own set of ten dice and board terrain pieces. After all, it is a miniatures board game, but they is great potential for making 3-D boards for this. This is not a far push for using a cork board from your office wall and building on that, since the boards are not that big anyway. It also comes with cards, stats, and rules in both French and English. This figures, since the game was made up by French gamers. The only issues with this is that there have been a few typos and mistranslated sentences from French to English. I probably would have never known if I had not hear some online complaints. It seems that you cannot please everyone.
    So anywho, our game was going to be just the demo scenario to get the feel for the game. Pantheon has two was that you can win in a basic game. You can capture this objectives that are called Omphalos which your God has to absorb or you kill you opponents God. There are two actions per unit activation. You can only do one type of action per activation. So no two attacks. Each unit has it's own special abilities. The smaller units that are mortals can be killed off, but you God can spent all of his actions to get them back. Heros, Monsters, and Gods are killed off for the rest of the game. The game is card driven where you draw a card at the beginning. Each unit has so many cards in your deck and the rest are Art of War cards that you can use to do extra abilities. It is still a " you go; I go" system, but has entertaining tactic to it.
     In our game, I chose to play Zeus with his trusty, kind of dopey looking Hydra, and some Spartans. It does not look like much, but I honesty did not touch or move the Spartans until the last turn. This was only, because I had activation cards left and they were all for Spartans. Kalissa went with Ares, Achilles, and some Hoplites. I killed her Hoplites about four times in this game with the Hydra. So now, I like the Hydra! However, I am not a fan of their Hydra's. At this moment, I am still looking for a good looking, scary Hydra. It has been a long search, and I have yet to put out an online Hydra finding website. Below are more like the Hydra I am looking for as examples.

      The way I went about winning this game was by taking the Omphalos first. I was getting pretty good at killing with the Hydra. One of it's great abilities was to attack multiple enemies within range. I found myself spending Art of War card for this throughout the game. Kalissa only thought I was winning, because we made fun of the Hydra so much based on all the various different green painted ones that we have seen. I used Zeus to collect the Omphalos. It was only until near the end that I realized that I had could use some Zeus abilities to help me. All around it was a good game that Kalissa, even enjoyed while losing. I am sure she is going to get the Manacore to kill me with. Here was some photos of the game in our hotel room.