Lords Of Heaven Review

Overview:

Lords of Heaven is an area control and card placement game for 2-4 players, coming to Gamefound August 27th 2024.

Each player takes on the role of an asymmetrical faction, either Christian or Islamic, namely Byzantines, Crusaders, Seljuk and Caliphate.

You will use actions to build units, fortresses, religious buildings, move your troops, fight battles and develop your presence in the Middle East.

There will be scenarios and a campaign to offer variants, as well as the standard game.

Rules & Setup:

Setting up the main gameboard takes about 10 minutes, depending on player count and players should spend no more than around 5 minutes getting their own player board and area sorted.

The rules in my opinion are a work in progress, but even in their current form you can see that there is an extremely interesting and thought provoking game here, with very good use of the 60+ action cards that come with the game.

Apart from some issues with layout and game descriptions, which can easily be sorted out during and leading up to fulfilment, the rules are detailed and the use of pictures, and explanations / examples are fantastic and really help to explain how the game actions work.

Theme, Mechanics & Gameplay:

The games theme is that of the crusades, and it does a very good job of recreating that conflict, especially in a game that is not miniature based. The action card useage in the game has been done exceptionally well, and in my opinion has some of the best card mechanics I’ve seen, especially the multiple uses for the cards, as each card can be used for each of the four game actions.

Your starting hand of four cards is made up from a hand of 3 via card drafting between players, and your 4th card is always your ‘dummy’ card, which when played always returns to your hand at the end of each of your own turns, or f you play during a battle.

As mentioned above each action card can be used to perform one of the games four main actions, namely, DEVELOPMENT, PRESENCE, MOVEMENT & INCOME.

You select and play a card into the designated area for the action, and either pay the cost in the bottom right hand corner to do the action, or receive the benefits in the top right corner.

I will run through each action below;-

DEVELOPMENT

By playing this action you get to place either your Church / Mosque, Citadels or a Fortress.

Each building has certain conditions you need to meet to be able to play it from your board onto the main board / map, i.e. Citadels can only be played if you control the city in which you wish to play it.

Churches and Mosques can only be played if you have a flag token in the area, and Fortresses can only be played if you have a flag / crown token adjacent to the space you wish to place the fortress token.

To take the DEVELOPMENT action you need to pay the accumulative coin cost shown on all the cards in the appropriate card row.

PRESENCE

Taking the PRESENCE action is how you place flag tokens in the area spaces on city cards, and crown tokens in the cities themselves.

Again, taking this action costs coins to the value shown on your card and other cards in the row when it is placed, just like the DEVELOPMENT action.

Players can only ever have one crown token in a city, and there can only ever be one crown token of any player in each city level.

MOVEMENT

The MOVEMENT action is used to move your flag tokens around the city cards, and is also how you begin a Battle or Siege.

You also gain benefits from this action, which can include get more money or extra units to use in battle. It does not cost you in coins to play this action.

INCOME

Again, the INCOME action when taken does exactly what it says on the tin, and gives you income, but not only monetary as you can also get extra military units, faith tokens etc.

Each action card has a faction symbol on it, and if when played for either the DEVELOPMENT or PRESENCE action and the symbol matches your own, or your affiliation symbol, or the universal symbol then you can also resolve the event text on the middle of the card.

You can resolve the card effect or the action effect in any order.

You gain VP’s by participating in and winning battles, with every participant gaining at least 1vp, and allies and the winners gaining more.

You also gain them at the end of each of both Crusades for meeting various on board conditions.

You can initiate both Battles & Sieges, and depending which option you choose you gain benefits and also remove some of your opponents board presence / improve your own as reward for winning.

There are a few differences made for 2 or 3 player games, from removal of some of the cards, as well as using the back of the location / city cards as these have only 2 areas in which you can play your crown marker.

These changes don’t impact on gameplay at all as far as we could see during our play through.