Intro to the battle of ancient gods

Is there a mechanism you grew to love over time? For us area-control / area-majority is an example for that. We used to think that it rarely works with 2 players and therefore we categorically avoided those games. 🙈 The first eye-opening game was Cerebria a few years ago, which didn’t just work, but which we immensely enjoyed playing. Recently we dipped our toes into the world of Root too, which admittedly has its limitations in 2p mode, yet it is a huge success on our table! These games can have really deep tactical and strategic depths. 🥰

This weekend we finally tried Ankh too, which might be yesterday’s news for many of you, but it represents uncharted lands for us! We did our homework, and read several times that Ankh could be the best Eric M. Lang game for 2 players. 🤌
I am in love with the theme: in Ankh you play as ancient Egyptian Gods! As a god you are only as powerful as the people’s belief in you, so you are competing with the other gods and fighting over control of monuments to become the biggest deity, before human society forgets you and your reign declines.

The rules are deceptively easy (especially for a box of this size), yet we had a bumpy start and quite a few aha-moments during our first session, which wasn’t short of sore moments and imaginary table flips 😂 (at least on my side, Kristóf is always totally chill).
Although I made a bunch of bad decisions and wanted to rage quit in every 2nd round, we still ended up having a very tight race for the last few points. This might sound like I had a bad first impression, but on the contrary! As the game progressed I started to recognize the depths hidden behind the simple ruleset and with that my curiosity grew. When we were done, I wanted to see more! And I did! Our second game went a lot smoother, with a lot more idea of what to do (or not to do), and more mind-games.

We will be definitely exploring this game a lot now and writing more details about it - we are even looking to perhaps expand the game with an expansion or two now for even more variety. 😛