Coming from the country that produced Dave Allen and Dara Ó Briain, I’m not averse to poking fun at religion. The boardgame Almighty tickled my funny bone a few months ago, and Wyrmgold has just launched a Gamefound campaign for their equally silly 2–4 player Believe in me! (please).
The campaign page starts off promisingly: ‘You are a god! Or that’s what everybody else should think. That tornado? Totally you. Tsunami? Somebody must have made you angry. Use natural events to convince people you control the elements to build your flock and show up those other namby-pamby false gods that you're the one, and absolutely only really true god!’ Ater that, however, the page takes a fair amount of effort to work through—only a small fraction is given over to gameplay, and that’s very brief and not hugely illuminating. There is a link to the rulebook and a short how-to-play video; hopefully, playthroughs will be coming soon.
The rulebook is fair but dense—there’s a lot going on in this game!
Let’s begin with the cards. There are:
- Phenomena (the aforementioned tornados, etc.), one of which players will bid for on each round;
- Heavenly Realm cards, consisting of Blessings, Relics, Enlighteners and Holy Hosts, providing one-time and ongoing benefits, penalties for others, and means of removing those penalties, respectively;
- Monuments, which you build to gain further permanent bonuses;
- Commandments, up to 5 of which are on display in the ‘Mountain of Commandments’ (in my opinion, an unnecessary chunk of cardboard—it might be a ‘deluxe addition’ though) and which impose constraints on players with certain characteristics.
- Trinity cards—your divine body parts (head, body and legs), each of which has a number of characteristics (targeted by Commandments) and an alignment (Gentle, Wrathful, Chaotic, and my favourite, Unfathomable). Various bonuses unlock as you gain these cards (such as increasing your hand size).
- Truth cards, used when bidding for Phenomena.
- And Holy Hand Grenades, to charge up and lob at other players.
There’s also a Start Squirrel (!?), a False Prophet, 140 amusingly illustrated believer meeples (the game’s currency as well as victory points), designated pagans before a player snaps them up, and who are fodder for sacrifices when the gods deem it necessary.
Each player has a busy personal area, arranged on and around a ‘God Tableau’ board. In the middle, you’ll find spaces for your god’s head, body and feet, and surrounding this are a Hand Grenade card; monk, missionary and nun Temples; False Prophet; and spaces for Monument, Phenomena, Enlightener and Relic cards. Players also have a deck of cards from which they draw a hand to provide the basis of turn actions, and a collection of believers.
Playing the Game
You start off as a somewhat incorporeal god, and part of the game is assembling your divine body by collecting Trinity cards for each body part (i.e., ‘manifesting’), while also accumulating believers and doing what you can to get in other players’ way.
To begin each round, players take 3-step turns. First, activate your tableau. Depending on which spaces you’ve filled with cards, tableau actions include:
- The player with the False Prophet figure must sacrifice one believer.
- Enlightener cards impose penalties on players possessing them, such as causing believers to be sacrificed.
- Relic cards are similar, but provide benefits.
- There may be an Alignment-specific action to perform at this point—e.g., Gentle gods gain believers; or Chaotic gods roll a die to see what happens. (Your alignment is the majority of your Trinity cards, or Unfathomable if there is no outright winner.)
- If there are sufficient believers in the various temples, the player can activate the temple, gaining new believers (whether from the pagan pile or from someone else’s pool of believers—known as illuminating or converting, respectively).
After resolving their tableau, players can perform 2 actions from:
- Play cards from your hand, typically at the cost of sacrificing some believers; Blessing cards provide one-time rewards; Relic cards provide ongoing bonuses, activated when the God Tableau is resolved; Enlighteners are played into others’ tableaus; and Holy Host cards offer actions such as removing a pesky Enlightener. Some cards provide additional benefits if they match your current alignment.
- Players can move believers into their temples, rendering them (mostly) immune from sacrifice, and allowing the temples to be activated during the next round.
- Building Monuments lets players upgrade their decks by banishing low powered (er, I mean low Truth) cards and gaining more powerful ones.
- A believer can be moved to a space on the Holy Hand Grenade to ‘charge’ it. However, unlike the one true HHG, the count isn’t fixed at 3, as the grenade can be launched towards an opponent at a count of 1 or 2 believers instead of waiting for the full complement, though the resulting damage will be smaller. At the start of the game, players are dealt 2 Hand Grenade cards, offering different types of effect, and choose one to keep and use during the game.
- A player can activate a Phenomena card on their tableau, discarding it afterwards. Phenomena effects include penalising other players or removing a Commandment from the Mountain.
- And finally, the player with the False Prophet token can use an action to dispatch it to another player, causing that player to lose 3 believers; they also reveal 3 Commandment cards and choose one to display in the Mountain.
Finally, draw back up to your hand limit.
After all players have taken their turn, everyone bids against each other for the next revealed phenomenon, using the number (er, Truth) value on cards in their hand as they desire. In the end stages of the game, Players may also sacrifice nuns to double their lowest Truth value. (Why nuns?? Why not, I suppose.) The winner gains the Phenomena card and also a body piece for their god, if it isn’t already complete.
After one player has manifested their god (i.e., have all body parts), the game enters its final phase, the Twilight of the Gods. All but 3 or 4 Phenomena cards (depending on the number of players) are removed, and players compete until those have all been claimed. At that point, the player with a completely manifested god and most believers is the winner. Ties are resolved via a game of Relic Rumble, which is Rock, Paper, Scissors but with 5 hands—er, right.
Campaign
As usual, there are standard and deluxe versions of the game on offer. Besides a few blinged up components such as Monument standees (not sure what function these have), the Commandment Mountain tower (implying that the standard game comes with no Mountain, though nothing seems to state that), 20 further believer meeples with new illustrations and a bag to put them in—nothing especially exciting. However, it also includes 9 additional Trinity cards, which don’t seem to be available otherwise. I’m pretty confident that the bling isn’t worth the extra money, but it’s guesswork whether the 9 Trinity cards make much of a difference on top of the 27 in the base game.
If you’re interested, you can also pledge for a couple of older Wyrmgold games, Hydra and Woodland Wizards . Investigating these games is left as an exercise for the reader…
On the face of it, the prices don’t seem awful, but once taxes and shipping are added, it’s a different matter. It’s a game I think I’d wait for retail to get, though the campaign doesn’t include a retail pledge level—maybe the game won’t hit retail at all.
Verdict
Believe in me! (please) might be a fun game, but it’s too early to tell. I think there’s a fairly simple game hiding underneath the complexity of the rulebook—basically, you have a tableau that causes you to lose or gain believers, and after dealing with that, you perform actions which improve your tableau or penalise someone else’s; then bid for ‘phenomena’ which let you build up your god’s body in order to trigger the game end; and keep an eye on the interaction between features of your god’s divine body parts and both alignment bonuses and commandment penalties, to optimise scoring opportunities.
The theme is certainly fun with amusing illustrations, and the take-that mechanisms seem entertaining, but without seeing a playthrough, I’m not sure if this is a game I’d play more than once. On the basis of what I’ve seen so far, I suspect that Almighty might be the more interesting game of the pair, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the campaign to see how it develops.
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
