Cyclades

The bidding phase is what sells Cyclades to me every time, everyone’s staring at the same pool of gods, and you have to decide how much of your gold you’re willing to burn to lock down Ares this round versus saving it for Zeus next round. That tension carries most of the game. Building an army and actually attacking someone is really more of a threat you spend two turns setting up than a thing that happens constantly, because anyone paying attention gets time to brace for it, which I didn’t expect going in.

Here’s my problem though, and it’s not a small one. My group found the Zeus card cycling trick, drawing back into Pegasus or Chimera to reactivate Pegasus, and once you’ve seen it done it’s incredibly hard to unsee. It’s basically become the running joke at our table now, somebody suggests Cyclades and it’s less “let’s play” and more “let’s watch Pegasus win again.” Great components, genuinely nice sculpts and board art, but a game that can be broken by one guy who read a strategy thread isn’t a game I can keep pulling off the shelf for new people without a house rule taped to the box.

It’s simple yet complex the way people describe it, every individual system, bidding, building, attacking, god powers, is easy to explain in one sentence, but stacking them together is where the real game lives. I just wish the endgame hadn’t found such an obvious crack in it.

Three stars. Good bones, undercut by a strategy that ruined it for my group specifically.