WHAT FOOLS THESE MORTALS BE
The gods of old really got around. There were demigods all over the shop in those days! And just like the worst parents you know at sports events, they couldn’t stop sticking their thumbs on the scale in favour of their kids. You can be that football dad! With divine powers!
Veiled Fate looks complex at first glance (and like many board games, it communicates to you in its own language), but it is not difficult to learn or to play. My nine-year-old daughter got the rules quickly. The bluffing… less so. The core of this game is deception and deduction. You are the parent/patron god of one of the nine Demigods (“Demis”), and your aim is to make sure your Demi has the most Renown at the end of the game. The twist is, you must keep who your Demi actually is a secret for at least some of the early stages of the game, or it’s trivially easy for your opponents to ensure you can’t possibly win while still advancing their own plans.
OMNISCIENCE
Veiled Fate is another of those games that looks significantly more complicated to play than it actually is. There are always nine Demis in play, no matter how many players are at the table (the game supports 2-8 players), but there are also Demi cards, City cards, Fate cards, Quest cards, Age cards, God Powers, and a (short) symbol-based game language to learn. Sounds like a lot! It’s simpler than it seems. Everything revolves around a central mechanic of voting (on the outcome of Quests or Age cards) using Fate cards, which are precious, highly limited resources. Fate cards also allow for the use of God Powers, which have big, swingy effects on the game but also make it obvious that the outcome of a particular Quest vote really matters to a player and so must be used sparingly.
Setting up the board is straightforward. Deal out one Demi card per player (or use the team rules, involving duplicate Demi cards, if there are enough players for that). All Demis go in the central City region, and all Renown trackers go in the section below the Abyss (score of 0). Find an Altar card in the City deck and place it on the City card zone, then shuffle the City deck. Shuffle the Age I, Age II, and Age III card piles, and select one of each at random. Put the Age I card face up in the Age card zone. Shuffle the Fate cards and deal five to each player. Assign a First Player and give them the First Player statuette (the two joined feathers). Deal out Quest cards to each region according to how many players there are.
Play proceeds from the First Player clockwise. Each player has two actions on their turn, which they can use to move a Demi (usually to a Quest, but sometimes to the City to gain a City card effect) or use a God Power. The simple turn structure belies the strategic complexity of the play experience. Fate cards are hard to come by and sharply limited: if you run out, you have to Rest, and pass all of your turns for the remainder of the Age (which is bad normally, and extremely so if your opponents have worked out which Demi you have and can freely mess with them). You can get them only by moving to the City (at specific, limited times) or moving a Demi out of the Abyss into the Pools. Using them to best effect is essential, and their scarcity means you really can’t spend them on God Powers very often. But you can’t hoard them easily either — if you neither gain nor expend at least one Fate card in your turn, you are forced to Rest, giving the other players free rein for the rest of the Age.
The game demands that you make moves that advance your Demi, but also obscure which Demi that is. While doing so, you’re also trying to deduce which Demis your opponents have. The best liar does not always win, though — keeping your secret does you no good if your Demi languishes at the bottom of the score tracker. There is an inflection point, usually around the beginning of the Third Age, when pretences are dropped and players go all in on their actual Demis in a race to the finish line. This creates a wonderful build-up of tension through the early stages and a frenetic rush at the end, with plenty of table talk as players voice their theories and try to trick one another.
THE METAL
I picked up the Metal Edition of the game, after playing a couple of rounds at a friend’s house with the standard edition. As advertised, this edition upgrades all of the plastic components to beautiful, weighty metal versions. The full list of these upgrades covers:
-
The 9 Demigod miniatures, all in distinct colours;
-
The 9 Renown Trackers, in the same colours;
-
The First Player indicator;
-
The City marker.
That’s twenty total pieces in metal rather than plastic. They have a satisfying weight and sheen to them, a pleasantly smooth feel in the hand, and hit the board with a little thud. It’s the same psychology behind a metal credit card — the sort of thing we all know we’re above until we try it — and it feels appropriately bourgeois. The colours are distinct enough for the figurines (which also have the benefit of being differently shaped!) but can be a little close to one another in some cases for the Renown Trackers (pink and purple, turquoise and green) and cause minor confusion.
The metal demigods and trackers, in all their glory
If you actually don’t feel the need to show off, though, you’re paying a premium for the same base game. I respect the decision not to “enhance” the game in any other ways for this edition, though. There is no FOMO here. You miss out on nothing by buying the “lesser” edition. If you want the pretty metal demigods, though, go for it!
DIVINE COMEDY
My family and I have had a blast with this one. In the Third Age, when all the pretences tend to be dropped, we’ve had some huge reveals and devastating reversals. This game is precision-engineered for tense, chaotic collisions in the last phase of play.
One especially memorable and personally embarrassing loss came about after what I thought was an exceptionally played first two Ages. I had successfully convinced everyone my favoured Demi was the red one (Pentha) when I was actually purple (Agamar). Red was in the lead, and purple not far behind. While my foolish foes tried to take down red, I would switch to purple, pull ahead in the last moments of the game and seize victory!
Great plan. Turns out another player was red the whole time, and I’d been doing her work for her. She cleaned up easily while I was still trying to switch gears. I’d made some bad assumptions early in the game, and completely discounted the possibility that red could actually be another player at the table. These types of stories — many of which make me look like a much better player, honest! — are what the game excels at. It’s a rush every time, win or lose.
