Lucky Duck Games have created a niche as a publisher of app-driven board games, including the Destinies and Chronicles of Crime series. Filip Miłuński's design builds on that tradition. Divinus is a board game where game play ties in with an accompanying app but it's a competitive legacy game for 2-4 players. The game's rules and components will be modified as you play through each of the 12 scenarios, and you'll ultimately finish up with your own unique 'Eternal game' that's still replayable at the end.
In Divinus, you play as demi-gods seeking favour from the Greek and Norse pantheons of gods. Your aim in each scenario is to satisfy the specific requirements of the conflicting Greek and Norse gods, with your ultimate aim of being to be the player who is elevated from demi-god to god at the end of the 12th scenario. The game comes with 12 tuckboxes and a large envelope of stickers. You're instructed not to peek at these so, other than in Box #1, we've avoided showing them off in our Board's Eye View 360; suffice to say, you'll be using stickers to add to and modify the rules as you progress through your series of plays of the game and, without giving away any Spoilers, you can expect an increase over time in the number of demi-god actions that will be available to players (you'll start off with just one). Just be warned that it's possible you might have to add rule-changing stickers midway through a scenario rather than just at the end... Even with a full complement of four players, you can expect to play through most scenarios in less than an hour but you might have to add another 15 minutes of sticker and rules update time...
The game's core mechanic involves tile drafting and laying. Players use their sets of chunky six-sided dice (regular dice but showing numbers instead of pips) and these are used in combination (adding or subtracting) to draft terrain tiles with which you'll construct a 4 x 4 map that may well remind you of Carcassonne (Hans im Gluck/Z-Man Games). Like the rules tho' the dice may be modified... Tho' we love modifiable dice as seen in Dice Forge (Libellud), Kapow! (Wise Wizard) and Lego's experimentation with board gaming - for example, Atlantis Treasure, generally speaking we're not keen on stickers on dice (they come off!). Being able to modify the dice in Divinus is a cool feature but the downside is that you're doing it with stickers.
Divinus is story driven in that there's a branching narrative that your plays will take you through. It's not going to win any prizes for great literature but it's sufficient for driving the game which is, after all, its purpose. It's just a pity that the story doesn't give more individual character to the various Greek and Norse gods that it depicts. The app is robust but it insists that players confirm every entry. Some of our team commended this for reducing the risk of errors but others complained that they found it annoying. Perhaps in a future app update Lucky Duck might be persuaded to make the repeated confirmations an option that can be switched off for players who prefer to live dangerously.
The large majority of successful legacy games are cooperative. As we found to our cost playing Seafall (Plaid Hat), competitive legacy games often flounder because of the difficulty in balancing a player's reward for winning individual scenarios against the need to offer catch-up mechanics so that other players are still in with a chance of winning. We reckon Lucky Duck have successfully pulled off that balance with Divinus.
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