7 Wonders Duel is one of the best 2 player games around, and if you’re reading this how to play for the Pantheon expansion I’m going to assume you already know how to play 7 Wonders Duel but now you want to add a little more content to your game. Pantheon is the first expansion for 7 Wonders Duel, and in my opinion turning a great game into one of the best by increasing the range of decisions open to you without really increasing the complexity of the game too much.
Setup
Setup for Pantheon has a few more steps than the base game, Firstly take the new Pantheon board and place it above the military track, it’s almost like it was designed to fit there! Secondly, some new Wonders and progress tokens, shuffle them into the base game ones, and draw the Wonders and progress tokens as normal. Now you’ll set up Age I as normal, but this time, you’ll add mythology tokens facedown to the cards as instructed in the manual, shuffle each individual mythology deck of the new divinity cards, place the other new pieces next to the board and you’re ready to go!
How to play!
The major change from base 7 Wonders Duel to Pantheon is the introduction of the divinity cards which you can make use of to have powerful effects on the game, I won’t go over what they all do here but is a comprehensive overview of them in the rulebook.
In Age I, you will be collecting divinity tokens and offering tokens, when you flip a card with a token on it, you flip it and resolve immediately if it is a divinity token. Each token has a symbol matching one of the mythology decks, you will then draw the top two cards of the corresponding mythology deck, select one of those gods and place it face down on one of the slots of the Pantheon board. The spaces closer to you will be cheaper for you, and more expensive for your opponent and vice versa. Then place the card you didn’t choose back face down on top of the corresponding divinity deck. Retain these tokens as they will have an effect in the third age for constructing grand temples.
In the second age, you will have new offering tokens that will offer you a discount on a god in the Pantheon, which is then discarded after use. The Age II setup will see you placing the Gate Card in the empty space and then revealing the gods on the Pantheon board, and placing three offering tokens facedown according to the setup.
Now starting in Age II, as well as the options of constructing a building, discarding to gain coins or constructing a wonder, you now have the new action of activating a card from the Pantheon but this doesn’t involve using a card from the structure like the other three actions. Pay the cost for the god or the Gate Card and immediately apply its effect.
In Age III, we now no longer use the Guild Cards from the base game but instead use three randomly selected Grand Temple Cards. Now in this Age, you can still make use of gods that have not yet been activated and additionally you can use your mythology tiles collected in the first age or pay the cost for the new Grand Temple cards. The Grand Temple tiles will be worth an additional 5, 12 or 21 victory points at the end of the game depending on whether you have constructed 1, 2 or 3 of the Grand Temples.
End of the game and conclusion
The other game end conditions remain the same from the base game, but now in scoring you will additionally score some of the divinities and the Grand Temples. There are specific tokens related to some of the gods such as the Minerva token but you can explore these by reading about the different god abilities in the rulebook.
I think Pantheon adds so much to the base game that once you learn it, it becomes hard to play without it. The option to activate a god on your turn from the second age onwards means adds an additional layer of strategic depth to the game where you can defer flipping a card you might not want to in the structure to your opponent and although the gods are all powerful, the placement, number of gods and shifting costs for each player keeps it feeling balanced and fresh with each play.
