Hello again! This time we’ll be discussing more about the gods of Deus ex Machina, their special abilities and how they interact with each other.
As an Olympian god, you have a variety of options available. These include typically appointing heroes to do your bidding, preventing other gods from doing so, hiring demigod heroes in progress, changing the course of the game.
There are 12 Gods in the Greek pantheon, followed by many lesser deities. For our game of 2-4 we think that the best representatives are Zeus, Hera, Hermes and Athena since they were most frequently mentioned in our research (see previous post, Ioannis Kakridis). We have plans for additions, that will add to the variability of choices via special abilities.
Speaking of abilities, each of the playable gods starts of with a unique ability to use during one’s turn. Once used the ability cannot be used until recharged.
Some of these abilities include:
a) reduce the physical (Might) difficulty of a quest,
b) reduce the tactical (Cunning) difficulty of a quest,
c) “reserve” a hero until his/her next move,
d) “steal” another god’s “trump card” (Divine Intervention Cards, explained at later post).
As for heroes, they didn’t belong to the gods, but they were their favorite playthings, to manipulate, encourage or curse. In our game it’s more of a who-will-use-who kind of thing, from a pool of heroes that goes in cycles. Every time a hero is used, he/she is discarded and another one joins to fill the gap, pushing the others to a higher state of readiness (increasing their power). Each god has a hero that he/she has favored during their adventures. These powerful heroes make short work of quests, but if used by a rival player, then that player has to pay tribute to the player whose “god” favors that hero.
That is all for now, we should post another entry of the Developer’s Diary once we get close to releasing the rulebook draft.
