Ok, I've been on the internet, I know how this works....I'm supposed to say.... You played it wrong! Did you try it with 3 players? Is area control even a genre you like? But you can play without the merge, just ignore that! You're Canadian, stick to Crokinole! Did I miss anything in "your opinion is wrong" bingo?

I have to agree with you. It also seems increasingly difficult to stop a player from scoring the same way over and over again. It feels like this is built as a snowball win for whoever’s in the lead. There’s so much I like about this game, and so much I want to like about this game. I think the actions are great I think the track is clever, but it’s the combination of everything that is less than the sum of its parts and that is a tragedy.

The often used critique that a game allows for experienced players to beat noobs always astounds me. I *want* this from good game, because the alternative is a game that's either trivial or random. If a game has any depth and players have agency, then gaining a deeper understanding will be a clear advantage. That's a good thing. I rarely play Chess/Go. If I play against an experienced Chess or Go player, I fully expect to loose. Anything else would be weird. If I just started playing M:TG and go to a tournament with my copied-from-net modern deck, the top 16 players will quickly leave me in the dust and return to being in the top 16 - and rightly so. That's not at all a flaw of those games - quite to the contrary - that's part of what makes them interesting and challenging. So I don't quite understand why "more experienced players have an advantage" is presented as a critique in so many reviews.

This is one of my favorites! I love this game at 2 and 4 players, although not so much at 3. Definitely in my top 10.

Thank you for the in-depth review. I definitely appreciate your honesty and the heartbreak of wanting to love a game and realizing it’s not for you.

Ankh is a very brutal game and the skill disparity between players will be heavily shown by it, due to not having any randomness or luck factor in the game whatsoever (the Pharaoh expansion changes this somewhat), just like in chess. I had about 12 games of Ankh so far and 50% of the time the merged gods actually won. So in my experience there is a crawlback mechanic and there are ways to catch up with a leader. But again, that needs players with roughly on the same skill, otherwise they will not able to pull this. I agree that monuments potentially giving more devotion than winning a battle is something new players should be informed about. But there are combat cards and Ankh powers which change this. E.g. 'Drought' gives you extra devotion for each of your figures in a desert hex in the region if you win the battle. So it is not a so clear cut situation. As for the merge: it is clear that it is a balance decision from the designer to have the merged players keeping the figures and monuments of only one player, also to grant them together the same number of action as other players are getting on their own. Everything else would make it way imbalanced. And yes, it can be a tough cookie to swallow for the last player that the game takes away everything he built so far. But the thing is: what he built so far was not really good. Exactly because it ended him up being in the last place. It won't suddenly magically generate him enough devotion to catch up with the others, and then same to win. Making him keeping it would not help him at all, but it could make him a good prey for the leading player to further cement his first place by taking away monument from him or winning battles against him.

I have loved all my plays, and they have all been SUPER close games. They have also all had 4-5 players with the merge. I also really love the Pharaoh expansion and to me it takes the game to the next level. I like this more that Rising Sun, but I am still keeping Rising Sun along with Blood Rage which I like the best.

woah! I was recently looking for your review of ankh because I wanted to see a review from someone who loves rising sun and see if it might be for me. I appreciate how many plays you have under your belt to have a more reflective review after learning the game well. Sounds like I'll be plenty happy with rising sun and bloodrage ^^

Petsuchos is a catchup mechanic. Also the pharaoh expansion made the game so much better for us.

After all the negative reviews, I was quite hesitant to play Ankh, but the one game I played was so close and a lot of fun. Despite getting absorbed, we managed to claw back out of last place and stole the win near the very end for a pretty exciting game. It was only a single play though, so I'm hoping to get some more plays in to see if the game continues to play that well for me.

"Some games are too expensive to settle for them being mediocre or inconsistent." - Chris George (The man without a catchphrase)

We play with one house rule that I belive makes the game way more fun: We include ALL 8 guardians for each level, without copies. We shuffle the cards, and when someone gets a guardian, he draws the top 4 cards and chooses one, putting the other 3 back on the top of the pile. This way everybody can get a guardian of each level, nobody gets the same guardians, and all guardians are present in the game as posible choices hehe

So far, I've only played one 2 player game. And typically, I don't have more than 3 players at a time. My initial impressions are very positive (my first game was EXTREMELY close). I'm curious to see if I experience the issues you've seen in future playthroughs. But for now, I am stoked to play more!

Such a great review! this is exactly how I feel after 20+ games. the game did feel great when the result is close, but after couple plays and all players are familiar with the lv3 Ankh power, there'll always be a runaway leader. And finally someone mentioned the problem of overflowed followers! I haven't tried Pharaoh expansion yet, but i really do hope the expansion fixes the game.

I agree with you completely yet I still love it 🤷🏻‍♂️ I guess I'm one of the stubborn ones. I think it's very sensitive to players being unbalanced in experience but if you could find people on your exact level it's a strategic masterpiece.

Damn, I really felt your excitement for those close games!

I own and enjoy Ankh so I was skeptical of your negative review, however the more I listened, the more you identified issues I've also spotted in the game: the runaway leader with no way to counter, the virtually automatic points from worshipful, the underused follower tokens, the snowballing effect of monument control, and the issues with merge. The merge only happened in one of my games - a 3p - and 3rd place dragged 2nd place from 1 point behind the leader to 7 points behind, basically pulling him out of contention. I could see merge working better in a 4p or 5p game, or in 3p if all players are within 3 points. This game has so much good going on that I do wonder if a few house rules could correct its issues. Some ideas off the top of my head: all followers disperse after each battle phase, build monument card gives you the option to takeover an opponent's monument instead of building your own by paying them 3 followers, worshipful requires 3 (or 4) followers to be sacrificed. For the merge, it allows you to choose which 6 Ankh powers to keep between the two players, allows you to choose which monuments to keep up to a total of however many the merging player with the most monuments had, and instead of dropping down to the lowest score, you split the difference between the 2 players' scores. Thoughts?

man me and my group absolutely LOVE Ankh

Appreciate the review. I skipped this one, and have recently been considering getting a retail copy with expansions… I agree with you - calling it a trilogy makes it even more enticing to have them all (those massive god minis from Studio McVey look so good). Technically Ankh is the 4th game in Eric Lang’s mythology series; the first being Chaos in the Old World, which I definitely grabbed before it went out of print, and yet haven’t actually played yet, lol. Though it looks good!

Thank you for the Great in depth review! I wonder how Dragon Bond will do in comparison since it has a similar merge mechanism.

Hey Chris, I was wondering your opinion on this game now after a year(although you mention you played it many times). Has it change or grown on you? Did you end up getting rid of it?

Great review. I really enjoyed watching and listening. It’s excellently articulated and some great points. I’ve had lots of great finishes myself. And close games. So I do feel different. But I can see what you say for sure. Guess it just depends on how even the players are? How good the teach is for new players? Or how quickly all players can upgrade their powers. I only find people fall behind when they forget to upgrade. I feel sometimes people give up upgrading if they miss out on the cool extra mins. So I always mention this in the teach. The extra fighters are ace. But the powers are crucial. And yeah. The merge. But there are generally only a few turns after this. It’s not a long part of the game. But yeah, it can be weird!

I think you should build a tomb for it, deep in the desert and have it discovered by an alien race one day and have them figure out why a tomb was build to hold one of the greatest games that might have been, but just wasn't meant to be.

I just painted this game last month. Can't wait to finally play it.

I would've suspected your review came down to you just hating camels, but somehow you convinced me otherwise. Well played.

Whoa boy. I looooove this game. If I was in CA I’d buy your Tomb of wonders box off of ya. Mine got banged up in a move.

Ive only played this one 2 or 3 times and its been fun, hoping to table again soon with the Pharaoh expansion. Most of the issues you point out seem like easy house rules. Like don't use that 3rd level Ankh power since it's "broken" or like you said don't use the merge mechanic (we just decided not to use it and everyone has still enjoyed the game). Some people just don't like to house rule games (I'm usually one of those as I like to play as they were designed) so just curious!

I think this is why most have said this is just a two-player game. The merge could've been done in a better way that makes the weakest players far stronger, not losing everything, and gaining more actions, making it feel unfair. The design overall probably has too many issues, and I think this will go the way of Rising Sun where it will be forgotten over time. Only Blood Rage has survived the test of time.

I was first introduced to Eric Lang as a designer with Chaos in the Old World. It was a surprisingly interesting albeit chaotic game and was just a good time. Was hyped about Blood Rage and was just disappointed with how meh it felt after the first play. I played it another 5 or 6 times and it always ran long and overstayed its welcome, the drafting took way too long with AP players, the combos in the game while cool can be happened upon through sheer luck of the draw which makes hate drafting irrelevant in some games which furthermore can create some situations with a runaway leader that is so far ahead by the third act that there's no point in even continuing but there's no rules to end the game early. It had some good ideas, but poor execution that held it back from being a great game. Everyone else in my game group felt the same way. Fast forward to Rising Sun. I gave that a chance hoping my feelings about Blood Rage were just a fluke considering how popular it was and still is. Unfortunately I had the same experience repeated. Played it a handful of times and it always just felt mediocre. The huge awesome looking Oni were cool looking, but died way to easily. The battle never seemed very enjoyable especially considering you could work to position yourself and then get hosed by someone who purposely lost in another battle and then had a surplus of coins to screw you over in another area you weren't expecting. Only one person in my game group liked it. After hearing so many great reviews about Ankh, I got extremely close to being lured back into to giving Eric Lang another shot. This review affirms all of my misgivings about the game after watching some playthroughs and watching a ton of reviews and I just can't bring myself to buy it now. Unpopular opinion: Eric Lang is a one hit wonder in the form of Chaos in the Old World which went on to inspire Cthulhu Wars which I've played around 8 times now at many different player counts and is also a great game. After playing games like these two, I've come to the conclusion, that there's soo many games out there, so why settle for something mediocre, overproduced, or just not great. Fun is the goal. If you're not having it, move on.

Just played ankh for the first time and it was an absolute 10/10 it was tight and in the last battle I managed to steal victory from the other player who was leading all game with a 7 devotion swing. As soon as the game finished we both were blown away with how fun it was. I’m curious to see if I’ll feel like you after getting more plays in. I really hope that excellent tense game wasn’t just a one off because it was incredible.

Another CMON game which needed more polish from the publisher. The result is people need to houserule to fix it's flaws.

Thanks man I can understand your point of view, I have only the core game and is not my copy :)

Also. Merge mechanic sounds like marriage :D.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the pharaoh expansion

I'd still love to hear your take on the pharaoh expansion

This is a game I was really disappointed I missed when it was first coming out. The theme and the ideas are just so cool. But I started hearing too many negative reviews and I’ve held back. I think I may have finally lost all interest! Ah well. Thanks for all your thoughts!

There's something about your critical reviews that I like a lot more than most other critical reviews. I actually don't watch many reviews, because I prefer to watch tutorials and playthroughs to see if I might like something. But, you're just so conversational! Typical actor...

I hear a lot of comparisons between this and DragonBond (which I fully backed). Glad to hear I don't need to also invest in this too.

I found ankh on sale for $60. You think that’s a fair price to give it a shot?? Thanks for all your videos!

I think you know that I agree with your opinion on this 😂 Back to Rising Sun for me!

Blood Rage + RIsing Sun are both top 5 games for me. I think Ankh is... ok. Your opinion of it is the closest I've heard to my own. There are aspects of it that I like, but it never clicks with me. I always end up setting others up for the good spots on the track, and then when I move it forward, it's on those damn camels that I never know what to do with.... Anyway, you're spot on that whoever gets the lead early ends up running away with it. Ah well.

Hey Chris thanks for the time and effort. Agree with you that you should recoup the losses from Ankh rather than let it torment you and your group :P Having said that, just a couple of my 2c: + RE punishing for new players: I find this a very strange critique. There are tons of games out there that are hard to master. Any newbie coming into Blood Rage, Rising Sun are expected to be losing as well. Ankh dials it up a notch more because there is no randomness/chaos. It's very chess like. + RE merge: first I applaud you to "try" to make it work. However, just based on the way you describing the merge mechanics, my guess is that you did not try hard enough :) you were focusing too much on the "negative" and not the "positive". The strongest aspect of the merge is the ability to trigger events with back to back actions on THE SAME TRACK. I don't think you mentioned that at all in the video, no wonder why you think the merge mechanics is "weak". When I teach the merge, I always mention that it is something people have to plan for at the beginning, not just when it happens because then you just gonna be subjected to all the negativity. I'm also surprised that with all those sessions you spend playing the game, you never once deliberately attempted to be part of the merge to confirm/understand your bias. :) So in conclusion, I'm one of the stubborn ones who would still think that you haven't fully understood the game despite the numerous plays. I don't know why that it, could be your groupthink, could be your dislike for the theme, I'm not sure. But it's clear that the game does not belong to YOUR collections.

I like Ankh. Even more than Blood Rage. Despite the merge and the ending. But Rising Sun is so much better for me than both of these games.

just picked up a copy for 50 bucks. Gonna play it a few times and see what I think.

I saw this one youtuber who said Ankh is a masterpiece, and Rising Sun is very bad, and here it's the opossite xd I suppose I should play them and see

Can you hold a tournament with all the games you enjoy the most and the winner is the one game you take with you in case of a fire? :D

Best to sell your copy before it loses in one of your brackets and has to be burned....

I've never disagreed more passionately with a review. Followers have never been useless in any game of this I've ever played. So many of the gods use followers for their powers. If anything, obelisk specialism is the weakest in an experienced game. The moment you get it - people just block your obelisks. There's usually maximum 3 spaces around them. Temples is the strongest because it's hardest to block and remains powerful even once you have lots of summons unlike pyramids which starts to lose value the more monuments you have. The catch up mechanic is super powerful and I've seen the merged team take over and win many times. Although the merge team no longer literally has 4 actions, you can essentially still do twice as much because you get 2 actions which (a) can be a duplicate, meaning there are no low value actions (b) can be a quadruple action if opponents are dumb enough to let the merged team get two end of track actions. Two god powers can be fun in all kinds of combinations. Playing as a team is also really powerful because two heads are better than one when you get to the end and every single decision matters. We've also literally never had a situation where the team disagreed on what to do in battle - so it wasn't like the second last player was the "lead player". It's all usually very amicable with both adding value. The idea that the last player gets washed away isn't usually that psychologically significant because if you're last, you don't usually have much of an empire to speak of anyway. This is disheartening in the early rounds when you are alone. If anything getting to feel shared ownership of another empire gives them more board presence. I've also never seen anyone just straight eliminated from the game. The elimination point is so late that everyone is almost automatically in the blue.

We have only played twice and have already identified how much of a problem ankh power rushing is. Not really sure how to fix it. It's especially a problem in a 2 player game when there are only one of each guardian

Ah that sucks to hear. I just ordered the base game and it’s arrived and I can’t wait to play it. I hope the merge works well with my kids when they want to hang up on me if I am leading. Since you are getting rid of it tho ….

This was a fair review, and although I think Ankh is a better game than you have concluded, it definitively has some issues. When I considered the evolution of the design choices Mr. Lang made during this trilogy, I discovered that some variations were better-executed that others. I've played my friend's copy (the deluxe KS version) several times but we haven't really delved into the expansion content. There's a lot to admire with Ankh, but the overall gameplay experience gave me some pause as well. Then there was the awkward atmosphere cast over the game when Mr. Lang exited CMON before the design was finalized and the middling reception of the merge mechanic. I remember thinking that making the merge mechanic optional was an odd choice, because it seemed to be a key part of the design philosophy. It's a beautifully produced game, but strangely leaves me with the impression that the bling is meant to distract from some lack of substance (more so in Ankh than in CMON's previous premiere titles). At the end of the day, Ankh remains a very good game. But... I'm happy I didn't spend my own money on it.

Do you feel like your schedule is more flexible now that there haven’t been any $1M campaigns for a while? :)

Okay but how do you feel about 7th continent?

Wanna be good at games together? 😉 Oddities aside, thanks for the review! I was looking forward to it.

like most cmon games, I bought it for the minis.

So do you still think Ankh is better than Lords of Ragnorak? Meaning continue to skip LofR?

Stonkh.

If your chances to catch the leading player are low, this can ruin a game . Some games have the option that the other players combine forces to catch up as only option, but I don't like it. I think it is much better, when the concept of the game itself provides something for it. Even worse when the game forces you to go for the weaker players...

This looks like a game I will not enjoy playing.

Why does your shirt say, "I love camel camels"? haha

Ankh is one of the worst games I've ever played. To me, it feels like a game that needs far more play-testing. The God powers are ridiculously unbalanced with some Gods gaining benefits every turn and other Gods rarely being able to even use their powers in a useful way. The very limited number of monsters that aid players are owned by the first players that obtain them which means the players in the lead pull further into the lead and thus harder for the slower players to catch up. As you mentioned, the monuments are super-important but so much of the monument building phase depends on things outside the player's control. E.G. Purely by luck of the Action table, some players will be able to have 3-4 monuments each before others even had the chance to obtain a second. It's easy to tell who's going to win each game by half-time. I suppose the merge mechanic is meant to help the players that are hopelessly losing but merging two turkey-gods does not make an eagle-god.

Wow No Pun Intended has such an opposite opinion than you. Weird. I wonder how often you've disagreed with NPI before... ever?

Your almost cheap...i know your not quite there because I am cheap. I wanted to get this game. But being cheap means there is no way in this world I'm spending that much on a game.... Even if it would be my favorite game... It's still not worth it.