A deeper look at Pillars of Heracles

A deck-building area control game with a rondel action-selection?
Yes, that is Pillars of Heracles! 😁 An exciting elevator pitch for a game, and it works wonderfully. After our previous post about the game, let’s dive deeper!

There are 5 actions you can do with the rondel: 🕵️

• Settle: claim territories on the map so you can exploit their resources
• Deploy: place out new units so you have more power and flexibility to manoeuver around
• Build: place out new buildings to benefit from their special abilities
• Procure: get new cards for your deck with all kinds of powerful effects
• Ascend: move up on tracks to claim diverse ongoing abilities

All of these actions can be repeated, so e.g. if you do a build turn you could build as many buildings as you can afford. This means that efficient planning and execution is rewarded - but on the flipside, doing an action for only a single thing can feel really bad. 😄 You have to be more efficient than others. This is where 2-player games might fall short (at least in our limited experience), as an amazing start for one player could snowball the game out of control for the other. 

Area control stands in the spotlight - and it brings with it lots of arithmetics. 📊 The different pieces will add up to a combined Power value, and their individual Power might change due to abilities from tiles or tracks, so you often have to recalculate who controls which territory. There is no combat in the game, but the game cleverly steers players toward conflict: even though you cannot remove enemy pieces from lands, if you dominate them by having more power present, it rewards you with track movement. Controlling a set of 3 lands with the same icon does the same. 💪

And the tracks are not just any boring tracks either, they play a huge role! ☝️ They can give you flexibility for rondel movement, improve your troops, increase your hand size or give you powerful mythology cards. 

The game felt very engaging and intense - but maybe a bit cutthroat with 2p, however I do think it is an amazing system and it feels very rewarding when you manage to pull a combo off.😁