Iliad is a clever little game that involves some bluff and a lot of second guessing of what cards your opponent/s are holding. You start the game with 12 army cards, which might be Archers, Hoplites, Chariots, Elephants and so on. When it is your turn you can lay a card in front of you, attack an opponent with a card that you have already laid, or pass and back out of that particular round (there are 8 rounds).

The rounds are called sieges, as each player is in command of one of the Greek armies that have arrived at the walls of Troy in order to assault, pillage and destroy the city. The aim of the game is to have the biggest army, and to achieve this you score points for Archers, Hoplites and Chariots. You can get points multipliers for putting Archers or Hoplites on Elephants, or putting Hoplites on top of each other in a phalanx.

You don’t score points until every player has passed. The trick therefore is to judge if you have enough points to win a siege before you pass. You get 3 extra army cards in the next round, so if you play a lot of cards before passing you cripple yourself for the next siege. If you have more than 12 cards in the next siege you discard down to 12, so you don’t get the opportunity to hoard lots of cards for the later sieges.

The winner of a siege chooses a Victory Card that could be worth 1, 2, 3 or 5 points. The loser is given a Thanatos card that reduces his points by 1 or 2, and effectively represents the displeasure of the gods at a player that passes early to save up his army cards. The game ends if a player reaches 12 points, or 15 points in a 2-player game, or after 8 sieges, in which case the player with the most points wins.

The Victory Cards are split up into Triremes and City’s, whoever has the most points worth of Triremes gains the Poseidon token worth 2 points, and whoever has the most points worth of City’s gains the Athena token worth 2 points. In addition, whoever won the last siege gets an Agamemnon token that is worth 1 point, and these tokens can move back and forth between players during the course of the game.

At its core Iliad is a game of math, mixed with card management and strategising whether to play particular cards early or late in a given siege, and early or late in a given game. Quite often you have to judge whether it is worth taking a loss in order to have a better chance in the next siege. You still need to lay a few cards to get your opponent/s to use up more of their own cards than they need to.

In a 3-6 player game there is another layer of strategy as players will often gang up on whoever has the most Victory points so far. Given that the Agamemnon, Athena and Poseidon tokens can be taken from another player, the points difference between the leader and the pack can swing back and forth, encouraging alliances between players, albeit usually short lived ones.

The kicker is the Thanatos cards, if you pick up a couple of those you are likely to lose. It is essential not to have the least points, and to make sure that any other player has fewer points than you by attacking their army cards. When you pass out of a siege you choose a Hero card that has a value from 6 to 1, Hero cards act as a tie breaker, which breaks ties for 0 points more often than determining the winner of a siege.

In a 2 player game the rules change slightly, most importantly you don’t use the Thanatos cards or the Hero cards. When a player passes he is not out of the siege in a 2 player game, the siege only ends if both players pass consecutively. This makes a big difference to how you play your cards, because if you are ahead on points you can afford to pass just to see what card your opponent lays next.

Card strategy often comes down to forcing your opponent to play more cards than you, in particular more of the useful cards than you. The army cards also include Ballista, Catapults and Trojan Horses, which although they have their uses are not worth points by themselves. If you have a lot of these siege engines you could lay them before laying any of your points scoring cards as a delaying action.

The artwork for Iliad is excellent, which make the game very pretty to play once a bunch of army cards are laid out on the table. Even the backs of the cards have Greek themed graphics, including shield heraldry in a style contemporary with that of the Ancient Greeks. The Agamemnon, Poseidon and Athena tokens are fairly large and have the face of the corresponding character on a decorated urn.

The rules are quite involved because of the interaction between army cards for point scoring, but they are clear and straightforward. The cards all have symbols on that indicate what card can destroy another card, and what their points multiplier is, which makes reading the cards very intuitive. The game also includes a couple of cheat sheets that summarise what all of the army cards can do.

Once you’ve played a couple of sieges of Iliad you kind of get the hang of it, by which time you’re likely to be losing badly, but its hard to remember all of the scoring options in the first game you play. By the second and third game it is very quick to play, and in my group players point out scoring options to each other, to help illustrate where a player can gain an advantage. Iliad is definitely worth the effort.