Ankh: Gods of Egypt, next board game in Blood Rage and Rising Sun trilogy, gets a Kickstarter launch date
Tomb good to be true.
Ankh: Gods of Egypt, the third board game in designer Eric Lang’s ‘mythic trilogy’ after Blood Rage and Rising Sun, is coming to Kickstarter later this month.
Ankh: Gods of Egypt is a board game for two to five players that has players assuming the role of Egyptian deities battling against one another to earn the devotion of followers. With ancient Egypt moving from an age of polytheism to monotheism, the gods must compete to stay relevant in an ever-changing world.
As with Lang’s Norse-inspired Blood Rage and Japan-set Rising Sun - which have earned a reputation as two of the best board games of the last decade - Ankh: Gods of Egypt is an area-control board game with a heavy emphasis on combat that sees players fighting to occupy different sections of the main board. According to Lang, the upcoming board game is more “streamlined” than the previous entries in the mythic trilogy, with a smaller and more powerful selection of abilities for players to choose from.
Despite being largely competitive, two players’ gods can choose to merge together to become a single deity - forcing them to work cooperatively as a team from then onwards. That team’s success is then judged against whichever god has the lowest amount of devotion - or victory points - at the end of the approximately 60 to 90-minute game.
Ankh: Gods of Egypt begins with three different regions for players to gain control of but, by using camels and caravans, players can alter the board and divide the board into additional areas for the gods to grapple over.
The roster of Egyptian gods in the game include Amun, Isis, Anubis, Osiris and Ra, each with their own unique power inspired by the mythology surrounding them.
As the god of the underworld, Anubis can trap opponents’ units in another dimension whenever they die, preventing those units from going back to the other player’s pool. The affected players then must give Anubis followers in order to recover the captured units.
Osiris - who in Egyptian mythology was betrayed and murdered - has an ability that enables the player controlling him to place a token on the board whenever he is killed. This token can be used to spawn Osiris back onto the board on the player’s next turn, as well as placing an effect on that region that benefits the player whenever any battle happens there.
Monsters derived from Egyptian mythology, such as mummies, reptilian Apeps and the Nile goddess Satet, can be recruited and commanded by the players. Unlike Blood Rage and Rising Sun, which featured legendary creatures from Norse and Japanese myth, more than one player can command the same monster, with multiple miniatures for each. Lang described the monsters’ abilities as “strong and definitive”, making each game of Ankh play out differently depending on which creatures are used.
As well as releasing Blood Rage, Rising Sun and Ankh: Gods of Egypt, publisher CMON is known for creating horror board game Cthulhu: Death May Die - co-designed by Lang - and co-op board game Marvel United, which raised over $2 million (£1.6 million) on Kickstarter earlier this year.
Ankh: Gods of Egypt is set to launch on Kickstarter on April 14th. Acknowledging the “difficulty period of time” resulting from the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, CMON said that it would keep the Kickstarter campaign’s pledge manager open “as long after the campaign as possible”. A release date for Ankh: Gods of Egypt is yet to be announced.