Olympus

In the Ancient Greece, the poleis (city-states) thrived increasing their population and culture, occasionally waging war against each other, erecting buildings and celebrating ceremonies to get the favour of the deities abiding on Mount Olympus. The players will lead one of these city-states (like Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Argos and others) expanding it and worshipping the various gods in order to become the hegemonic power of the Peloponnesus!

Olympus is a deterministic (i.e., non-random) strategy game, based on worker-placement, resource management and building an efficient engine to score victory points (VPs). It also features a few more aggressive options than the average game based on the same premises (but the savvy player knows how to defend against them, if he prefers to quietly develop his own position).

Each player leads a city-state that is defined by six values representing population, culture, military and productivity of the three resources (grain, venison and fish). During your turn, you send one of your three priests to worship one of the ten deities (Zeus, Hera, Demetra, Artemis, Poseidon, Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus or Apollo). Each opponent can now send one of his priests to celebrate the ceremony with you. After that, the deity grants his favor to whoever has sent a worshipper: the favor is larger for the leading priest (the one of the active player) and smaller for all the others (for example, Athena boosts culture by two points for the city of leading priest and by one point for the others; of course no boost is given to those who refused to send a priest to worship her). That deity cannot be chosen again in the current turn.