Cyclades, Inis, Kemet: Observations on Matagot's Legendary Trinity

Cyclades, Inis, and Kemet are a mildly mythical (ahem) trio...

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This was a great read. I've typically enjoy dialog pieces and this was a really well done one. Thanks to both of ya.

I really need to give Cyclades a shot. An angry auction game with egregiously Greek set dressing is practically tailor made to appeal to me.

Thanks! When I re-read it, we sound like we're talking Cyclades down, but it's really an engaging game; even more so if you're into the mythology. I managed to sell it to a friend who's totally not into DoaMs (would never play Runewars, for example) because of both the theme and because of its auction aspects. She loves it now.

Cyclades is where it all started for me.
I hope it doesn't appear we are talking it down. Also, the Rulebook for seasons of inis expansion is up at BGG, but seems to be lacking the actual text from the cards
used for adding in The Seasons mechanic and the new season cards.

Great discussion, I really enjoy most of these games and they are different enough for me. Cylades without expansions is good but I really loved Hades the most where it provides one extra way for players to get troops and ships every 3 ish turns. Titans turned it into too much of a predictable dudes on a map game with super stacks forming and crushing areas. Kemet is by my favorite for the aggression and exciting powers. Inis is easier to teach but has that annoying possibilty of the game ending anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours - hopefully the new expansion rules fix that a bit.

Scott_F wrote: Great discussion, I really enjoy most of these games and they are different enough for me. Cylades without expansions is good but I really loved Hades the most where it provides one extra way for players to get troops and ships every 3 ish turns. Titans turned it into too much of a predictable dudes on a map game with super stacks forming and crushing areas. Kemet is by my favorite for the aggression and exciting powers. Inis is easier to teach but has that annoying possibilty of the game ending anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours - hopefully the new expansion rules fix that a bit.

The "We need a king" module is supposed to address this. It seems simple enough to implement the new module even without buying the expansion

That was my attitude on Hades, as well. To me, the Hades expansion seemed like a tweak, as opposed to the overhaul that is Titans. I think Wade's point about the ability to simply come bursting across the map with a horde of undead is certainly possible, but I haven't really had that experience in my games. Plus, I feel the Heroes are a huge dose of flavor to the game, while not being an outrageous upgrade in terms of player power.

Yep, I am with Scott_F. I like HADES a lot, adding it to the already great CYCLADES. It adds an Army, and man, sometimes you need that. I wonder if the like/don't like on HADES is about how many players there are? I can see it being bad in 3P, for example.

This is interesting because I'm surprised so many people prefer Hades.

Among all of these games, this my preference.

1. Cyclades with Titans (plus Monuments if possible)
2. Inis
3. Cylades (plus Monuments if possible)
4. Cylades with Hades
5. Kemet

I like some of the stuff in Hades but I don't like the overhead and complications. Having to look up the heroes can be annoying, we also really dislike the Amazon or whoever lets you take a Metropolis off the map. The mini artifacts are kind of neat but again, annoying. Same with the new type of card.

Titans on the other hand adds simply one more god and unit which lets you move. The new board and seeding of buildings is absolutely great. The game speeds up and there's more action. The Titans are powerful but I've seen people win without them.

I also think the Monuments expansion is underrated. It offers new incentives to build certain buildings which can freshen up the bidding. Very neat and easy to implement.

Yeah I should clarify. We use hades for the god and necropolis only, not the extra heroes as it was too time consuming to check what they all did. Thats more of a kemet thing. I do like the monuments and the purple army itself looks cool, but all the games ended the same with a huge army and titan rolling to victory.

I looked at the monuments expansion but at first glance it seemed too similar to the module in titans. I'll have to give it a try.

I've only played Cyclades out of these three, sadly. It's great though! I've played base and with Titans, but not Hades. Like Wade, I usually lose, in part because I'm usually one of the first to go hard for that 2nd metropolis.

Scott_F wrote: Yeah I should clarify. We use hades for the god and necropolis only, not the extra heroes as it was too time consuming to check what they all did. Thats more of a kemet thing. I do like the monuments and the purple army itself looks cool, but all the games ended the same with a huge army and titan rolling to victory.

I didn't even think about the Heroes--we don't use those either! That's funny. Scott_F and I arrived at the same build of CYCLADES through covergent evolution.