When I was asked to play a social deduction game for 2 players I nearly burst out laughing, until I saw the straight face my friend was making. When I realized he was serious, I started laughing. So, you could say I wasn’t too enthusiastic about playing Enthrone, but boy was I wrong.
Enthrone is an abstract, two-player deduction game where you will be guiding 8 unwilling pawns in an effort to conquer the Regalia or eliminate your designated opponents before your opponent figures out which character you really are.
Game setup and flow
Enthrone is a fast passed game with a fast passed setup. Just put the board in the middle of the table. Place each of the 8-character pawns in the starting spaces marked with a lion crest. Give each player 3 character cards and set 2 of them secretly to the side. Give each player an aid card containing all the characters and their quarry. Next to the play board, set the action board. Shuffle the action tokens and place them on the action board in a random order. You are good to go; you can start scheming away.
The flow of the game is delightfully simple. On your turn you can move one of the character pawns whose action token is in the green area of the action board. The pawn may or may not be your chosen character, that is for you to know and for the opponent to find out. You can move from your current location one step in each direction. There are some restrictions: you cannot go back to the original starting position and you can not enter a space with another pawn unless you have the attack symbol next to the action token of the character you are activating. In that situation, you can remove the other pawn from the game and its action token will be turned face down. Each time a pawn is eliminated the other player needs to confirm or deny if the eliminated character is their character. After a particular character is activated, its action token goes on the last spot of the action track which means that that character will not be available for another 3 turns.
So, why all the secrecy and planning going around, backstabbing other pawns? Well, to win of course ….doh… ohh wait I forgot to tell how you win, haven’t I? The win con is as simple as the game play. You need to achieve one of the following 4 objectives. You can figure out the other player character and kill it. If not, you can hunt for your quarry (the 3 targets assigned on the hidden role card) and as soon as the 3rd quarry is killed you win the game. Another win condition or to better put it, a lose condition, is if you kill a 4th character without killing the opponent or all 3 of your quarries. Be careful this killing spree counts the opponent’s victims as well so as soon as 3 characters are dead you should be very careful on who dies next. The 4th win condition and by far the most boring is to move your character pawn to the centre of the board (called Regalia). This however needs to happen while the action tile of the pawn occupies one to the top 3 spaces on the action board (these spaces are market with Laurels).
The Good
I will start off with the obvious, the components. For how basic the game flow is, these producers could have went for a utilitarian and basic approach and create some components similar to Hive. But they did not. The pawns are 3D printer bust-like figures. The map is design to replicate a stained-glass window from a church or a medieval castle and the player secret roles, are clear and language independent.
I said it a couple of times now, a good game is one with a lot of tension and a lot of decision-making space. Enthrone ticks both of those 2 boxes. Firstly, the decision-making space is vast, you are not limited to one character, you can move all 8 pawns hence the possibilities are enormous. The tension is also there. You can move your character pawn in hopes the opponent thinks you are bluffing and you are moving a character you don’t care about. Or you can play only with the characters of your quarry in hope your opponent will pick them off one by one and do your dirty work. Again, the possibilities are there and I love every minute of this type of tension.
For me 2025 was the year where I continuously searched for streamline and elegance in design. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean I stayed away from heavy games, it just means that I actively searched for games that weren’t convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, cough cough here is looking at you mister Lacerda. Casle Combo, Mombasa and now Enthrone fits into that category and I am happy that I found these games.
The last item I am keen on experimenting with this game is the possibility of a 2 vs 2 variant. My wife and I played with some good friends of ours in a format of team A vs team B and we are happy to say that the game actually worked. We didn’t change a thing rules wise, we just talked and discussed in pairs about what to do and what actions to take.
The Bad
The hidden deduction games have this weird feature about them that can and will transform from time to time into a nasty issue…. I am looking at you meta decisioning. Every player is prone to a certain type of approach to these games, for example if I am playing Secret Hitler, and I am delt the titular mustachio failed artist role, I will play as liberal as I can. And my friends know that and they take me out immediately. This, dear reader, has an impact on the game when my role is liberal when I also get taken out of the game as soon as possible because my friends still remember that one time I won as Hitler by being ultra liberal. This is the case with Enthrone as well. My wife is convinced that I start the game by activating my actual character hence she goes and tries to kill the first pawn I touch almost immediately even if it makes no sense for her objective to do this. This drives me to firstly activate one of my quarries to capitalize of her decision to kill of that character. Est voila, due to metagaming you have just eliminated agency out of your game.
This brings me to my second complaint with the game. Due to these meta decisions, I believe the game hasn’t a high replayability with the same group. Just try It as often as you can with other groups. This will ensure you don’t end up in a situation where people remembered who played what 7 games ago and do something crazy that blows up the game just because one time, they got tricked by whatever random action.
If what I have written above can be considered a nit pick or a general issue with the social deduction games, the next item on my list is a particular fault of the game. Remember that rule about losing if you kill the fourth character without killing your opponent or quarry? Well this rule tends to turn into a drag if by the time the 3rd character is killed, nobody is sure who the other player is. This turns the game into a deadlock type of match, were everyone tries to go for the Regalia win and this, my dear reader, turns a dynamic game into a boring as f… situation where I personally enjoyed losing then still continuing the game.
The Perfect Home
Enthrone prefers a habitat of light weight games or abstract board games enthusiasts. Being a lightweight game, it can be presented to any home regardless of previous board game experience. Also, this is a language independent game so it is a perfect fit to play with any family member regardless of their age.
