![Game Preview: Four Gods, or Building Blocks of New Worlds](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/RWShFylxGf18g5xLlU95jA__medium/img/Kof_83ZkRLgONIQaNP5rR_31biI=/fit-in/500x500/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic2727667.jpg)
Of the games that I did play, I actually played one of them twice on different days, with that game being a prototype of Four Gods, due out in 2016 from designer Christophe Boelinger and his company Ludically. Four Gods caught my ear at the Asmodee game night event that introduces forthcoming games to its distributors and large retail partners — with most of the games presented there being off-limits for public discussion right now — thanks to Boelinger's claim of this design being the only one in existence that takes less time to play when you have more people at the table. (I can think of two possible counter-examples, but my copies of them are in storage, so I can't check the label. Any suggestions?)
At game night, I watched people play (as depicted below), then had to try it out myself. Boelinger later brought the Four Gods prototype to the BGG booth, and we recorded an overview of the game from him as well as a full seventeen-minute playthrough and scoring. That's a first for us at a convention, but this game is far easier to absorb visually compared to what's possible in a description — at least I think so, but here I've laid out both description and videos and you can follow whichever path is preferable for you.
In more detail, players sit outside of a cardboard frame that represents the limits of the world. Each player starts with two randomly-drawn tiles in hand, with each double-sided tile depicting 1-3 types of landscape out of the four types present in the world.
Instead of placing a tile, a player can place it in their personal discard area, which can hold at most ten tiles. When a player has both hands free, they can draw two new tiles from the bag; alternatively, any player with a free hand can pick up any tile in any discard area and place it in the world.
At any point during the game, a player can claim one of four gods and that god's followers. Each god is associated with a particular type of landscape, e.g., the merfolk god. Once a player has followers, they can place a prophet on a tile they just placed to claim that section of landscape. Players can place any number of prophets in a landscape as long as they're placing each prophet on a tile they just added to the world.
Once the world is filled or players agree that no more tiles can be placed, the game ends. Each player scores five points for each city occupied or smashed. Each landscape with one or more prophets is worth a number of points to the player(s) with the most prophets in it equal to the number of tiles in that landscape minus the number of prophets in it. The landscape with the largest mass rewards its god with a large bonus, with the second and third largest masses rewarding their gods with smaller bonuses; similarly, the landscape that appears in the most distinct groups rewards its god with a large bonus, with the second and third largest groups again rewarding their gods with smaller bonuses.
Whichever god has scored the most points wins!