Hybris: Disordered Cosmos
You play as technologically advanced members of the Olympian Pantheon just after the overthrow of the Primordials. Your goal is to achieve true godhood by bringing technology and order to Greece while tracking down and sucking the life force from the remaining Primordials.
This game has a LOT of rules and mechanisms; but here’s a high level overview of play. The main board is made up of 7 regions, each of which provides 2 actions the player can take. Each region also has a limited number of worker placement locations which provides bonuses for the players who go there; but players can use a region whose locations are full at a penalty.
Each player has a board with 6 flip-able tiles on it with “spark” cubes, temples, heroes and prophets on them. Various actions in the game allow you to deploy those items, and when the last item on a tile is deployed, it can be flipped and gives the player some special ability. One way to win is to flip all of your tiles before any other player and before the end of the game (otherwise victory points are compared at the end).
There are also numerous tracks and resources: prayers, followers, “aegis” (life force from Primordials), Greatness, Determination, Virtue, etc. At the start of the round, in Greatness order. Players will choose their turn order, gaining a special ability for that round in the process.
In each of 6 round, players will have some set of workers: The Olympian themselves and some number of Heroes and Prophets (one of each to start; but up to 2 more of each deployed from the tiles on their board). At the start of the round, they will secretly assign a region to which they will be placed, although the Olympian is always free to go wherever they want. The players take turns placing their workers and taking the actions in the regions. As a few examples, players can go to the Coliseum to fight (and in doing so, get additional heroes on their side), or they can go to the underworld to revive a worker that had previously been depleted in combat. They can go to Olympus to get the blueprints for some technology and then to The Forge to build it, and finally to the Mortal World to deploy the technology. They can go on multi-stage quests or consult The Oracle about threats to the realm.
At the end of every even round, a threat is revealed and while all players are impacted some, those who have not prepared for it are impacted most.
There’s some interesting game play here; but in the end this was just too many mechanisms for me. Too many resources and tracks. Too many special rules for resolving different things. Too many “see page N for how to do X” in the rules. I would play it if folks were interested; but I would certainly never offer unbidden to teach the game.