Bored? Game! – Elysium

Card drafting will be a mechanic well known to players of any collectible card games such as Netrunner or Magic the Gathering, where booster drafts allow players to build a deck on the fly and test their choices (and luck), and it’s a device that’s proving popular in videogames if Hearthstone and FIFA Ultimate Team are anything to go by. It’s the perfect device for challenging a player to make something interesting out of a series of limited options. It’s also the mechanic at the heart of the deck builder genre, where games like Dominion and Marvel: Legendary challenge you to construct a functional deck over the course of the game from a pool of cards shared with an opponent. Here you’re not only constrained by your own choices, but by those of your opponents.

Card drafting is at the heart of Elysium, a new game by Matthew Dunstan (Relic Runners) and Brett J. Gilbert (Divinaire) and published by Space Cowboys, only players aren’t building decks but Poker style sets referred to as legends. Each game five out of the eight factions, effectively the game’s suits, are randomly chosen to form the common deck and over the course of five rounds player draft these to populate their Elysiums. Cards are drafted from the centre via four chunky coloured wooden columns. To get a card you have to have the column depicted on the card and then spend one (not necessarily the one on the card, which feels odd at first but does give you more options), but since there’s only enough for three per player and one spare, you have to be careful you’re left holding on to the right colours. To make matters worse you also have to expend a column to go on a quest that will gain you gold and determine the turn order for the next round. Missing out results in a failed quest, which is pretty disastrous.

The game’s complexity comes from the fact that cards don’t go straight into your Elysium, first they assemble in your domain and special transfer points, also gained from quests, need to be spent, along with gold, to move the cards down into your Elysium each round. The trick is that while cards are in your domain they are normally giving you some kind of benefit, allowing you to create what board gamers often refer to as an ‘engine,’ but as soon as you retire them that benefit stops. Since you’ll only get a few transfer points each round the game becomes a real balancing act of timing of when to commit your cards to legend. Wait too long and you’ll have very little end game scoring, but move too quickly and you’ll miss out on some regular bonuses, not to mention potentially lock down your sets too early (once set cards in your legend can never be moved). Another thing to consider is the fact that you can draw a citizen (a facedown card) if you have no options, which acts as a very useful joker for building sets but is worth minus two victory point at the end. Basically some random human chump turns up in a legend devoted to the superhuman gods, just like Hawkeye in The Avengers.

This is a game of myriad tricky decisions, and is incredibly satisfying for it. It’s hard to know which cards to draft first, allowing others to fall into the hands of your rivals, and do you go on a quest straight away or risk missing out altogether? Fortunately the coloured columns allow you to keep an eye on what everyone else is buying to plan your move – for instance if everyone has spent their yellow column but you, then you know you have access to cards and a quest no one else does. Once you’ve purchased the card, the decisions don’t end there. Now you have to decide when to send the card to your Elysium and which legend you’ll commit them to. Every decision you make limits your future options, as well as those of your rivals, which makes the game incredibly tense – like you’re balancing on a knife edge.

The eight factions all have their own theme – Aries introduces military counters for new scoring opportunities, Pisces is all about punishing the other players and Hephaestus is about gaining gold – and different combinations change the flavour of the game considerably, making for some great variability (especially when you consider that in most games you’ll only get through two thirds of the deck). Elysium is hands down the best game I’ve played so far this year, although I am incredibly biased towards card drafting games. If that’s a genre you like too, then you can’t afford not to have this in your collection.

Designers: Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert
Publisher: Space Cowboys
Core Mechanic: Card drafting, set collection
Number of Players: 2-4
Play time: 90 minutes
Complexity: Medium