Mythologies is an upcoming game where players draft cards from four different domains to build out their tableaux, with a loose civ-building theme that ultimately comes down to its novel card-drafting mechanic. It’s a quick-playing game with some simultaneous actions, where players will only draft eight cards over the game’s four rounds, with a lot of the action happening on your 3×3 tableau, which can allow you to add, stack, or discard cards for points or currency. It’s a lot of game for its size, although in the end I found the point-salad aspects a little overwhelming.
Mythologies comes from two new designers, one of whom has a credit for a deckbuilding game I don’t know and the other has no other credits on BGG, and does do something I haven’t seen before in the card-drafting mechanism. Each player gets three tokens, two Yes and one No, to use during each round. There are four areas on the common board from which you can draft, and you’ll be randomly assigned one of those for this turn – you can only take a card from that area this time, cycling through all four during a single round. You secretly choose one token for this turn, and then everyone reveals whether they wish to take a card from their area or pass. You can only take two cards total per round, so you’ll have to pass twice no matter what.
At the end of the round, you take the two card you drafted and place them wherever you wish on your 3×3 board, taking the reward(s) shown on the left side of the card based on the rows in which you placed them. You can also gain rewards from finishing a row or a column, and then you can use any power written in the text on the bottom of the card, which often involves a secondary condition such as whether there are cards above or below it in the tableau or whether it’s stacked on other cards. These powers may call on you to even discard a card, or move cards around, or “crush” cards on your tableau by piling cards on top of it to gain points or gems.
Cards may have immediate one-time powers, ongoing powers, or end-game scoring effects. Some cards also require you to pay a cost first, usually in gem tokens; you can acquire gems by completing rows on your board, or through card effects (like crushing), and at game end your remaining gems are worth 1 point per 3 gems remaining. Starting in the second round, players may also draft Deity cards, which cost 4 gems and provide end-game scoring benefits. Rounds 3 and 4 also bring Trials, where you can gain victory points by meeting certain conditions on your tableau.
The game comes with eight decks of god cards, with four reversible board pieces, so you have many possible board setups, with some cards and decks easier to learn and use than others. Those card decks and the trial conditions change in each game because the board itself is modular, so the sentences that make up the trial conditions vary based on how you assemble it.
Mythologies is a perfectly solid game, a classic grade B under the old Paste system, a game that does what it intends and is internally consistent, with rules that work and a ton of replayability. I also wasn’t driven to get back to the game for more plays. Some games with combinations – where you play several things, whether cards or dice or something else, to make more powerful moves as you go along – make me want to play again and again, but this one didn’t have that. It may just be in the eye of the beholder.