Divinus

• Designer: Filip Muilnski
• Publisher: Lucky Duck
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45-60 min per game, campaign of 12 games
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Divinus is a competitive, legacy, tile-laying, digital hybrid game in which you play as a demigod seeking to gain the favor of the Gods and ascend to a new pantheon. Players embark on a twelve-scenario campaign that will see them exploring lands, completing quests, interacting with Gods, and impacting the outcome of the epic clash between Greek and Norse pantheons.

At the beginning of each campaign scenario, players open a sealed box of new quests, 

components, stickers, Gods, gameplay mechanisms, and more. The Divinus app provides a narrative for players and sets the stakes for what is to come. Each turn, players spend dice from their pool to explore new tiles from the world board. Laying tiles into their demigod map, they must place tiles adjacent to one another and with matching features while working towards overall quest and God goals.

Throughout the campaign, players make permanent changes to their demigods by collecting powerful artifacts, forging their dice by altering their faces, and earning titles for the feats they achieve. Players will also permanently change the game world by altering tiles and placing new locations, heroes, and monsters onto the map tiles. When players complete quests or other significant goals, they can make pivotal decisions through the Divinus app.

Players will decide the outcome of dilemmas such as choosing which side is victorious in battle, building or destroying a holy site, and choosing whether a God lives or dies. Whichever outcome the player chooses, the game components may be changed and the Divinus app will remember and present contextual options in the future that are impacted by the decision. Returning to a fort that you helped the Norse Gods build could see you praised, while demigods favored by the Greek pantheon could be shunned.

The Divinus campaign is ideally played over several game sessions due to the persistent and changing world. The rulebook grows with each scenario as new rules and content are unlocked. Once the campaign is complete, players can replay their unique copy of Divinus with a post-campaign Infinite Replayability mode.

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Divinus is a competitive campaign legacy game from Lucky Duck – and as you might guess, it relies upon a smartphone app to play.  Lucky Duck has always been a game publisher on the forefront of app integration, and this campaign uses the app to take care of a lot of the busywork and notekeeping.  It also uses the app to provide the bulk of the story which is read aloud to the group.

We are partway through the campaign, but I think I’ve played enough to talk about the game – and frankly, even if I were finished with it – the amount of info that I’d relay in the review would likely be the same because I’d want to avoid any spoilers about the scenarios themselves…  What I will do here is talk about the general flow of the game and what you can expect in the first game.  There really aren’t any spoilers IMHO in the first game, and hearing about that might help you figure out if this is your sort of game or not.

I would recommend that if you’re planning to play – that you go through all the rules in the rulebook first and NOT start the app until you’ve read all the stuff that comes pre-printed in the rulebook.  The setup tells you to get the stuff on the table and then boot up the app.  The app then goes right into the story, and then before you know it, it’s ready  for someone to take their turn.  I think you’ll get more out of the story and whatnot if you at least know what the game expects you to do when it’s your turn.  So, that’s my recommendation on how to start.  In general, the app will tell you all sorts of stuff, but if it’s something in the rulebook, it will never mention it again and it assumes that you have read it on your own.  

Each game, you’ll open up a numbered scenario box which will give you some new components to the game.  Otherwise setup is mostly the same, placing twelve tiles onto the market board (sacred place tiles on spaces 1-6 and faction tiles on spaces 7-12).  There will also be Gods available in each scenario, each providing their own scoring rules.

As you play through the scenario, you’ll be working on getting red glory points for the Greeks and blue glory points for the Vikings.  Your total points will also be calculated – adding together your red Greek points, blue Viking points, and a few uncolored bonus points.  The app will keep a running total of the scores.

In a four player game, each player has 4d6 at their disposal.  They start out as standard dice, but they will quickly be modified, with stickers being added to the faces of those dice.  At the start of the scenario, they are rolled and placed in front of the player.   Depending on what scenario you are playing, you might have other things at the start as well.  Or maybe I’m just saying this to preserve the mystery of what is to come!

So on your turn, you have two main options: get a tile or rest.    If you get a tile, you use the dice in front of you to make a number between 1 and 12.  You can use a die on its own, or you can add or subtract them.  Take all the dice you use, and then place them on the numbered space in exchange for the tile there.  This tile must then be placed in your area, not exceeding a 4×4 grid, making sure that all the edges match.  The tiles have three landscape types (water, fields, mountains) and optionally may have faction icons on them.   For example, if I wanted to pick up the tile in the 10 slot, I might end up using my 6, 5 and 1 (6+5-1 = 10).   If I choose to rest, I remove my dice from the board, and I refill any spots now left empty because I took dice off those spaces.

Most scenarios have quests (coming from the Scenario box) – there are in-game goals which are granted to the first person to meet the criteria for them.  Generally, you will score points for completing the quest, and you may get the use of some stickers.  Some stickers can be put on your dice and other will go on the tiles.  If you get a location sticker, it is placed on a tile, and then in any game going forward, whenever someone plays that tile, you use the app to scan the sticker – and both the player who placed the sticker as well the player who just played that tile will get some sort of bonus.  Of course, you have to remember to scan 

The game continues until a player has finished their 4×4 grid (completing the current round) or a more rare case when all players have passed twice in a row – I suppose this is most likely to happen when no one can legally place a tile from the display.

The app will then lead you through the scoring.  You get a bonus point for completing your 4×4 grid.  Then each God in the Scenario will be scored – the app asks you questions about who wins, and you dutifully click on the name of the appropriate player.  When you get through all the questions, you get a bit more story, and it tells you the turn order for the next game.  You can then either continue to the next scenario or pack things up. We thought that the app was glitching because it never actually tells you what the scores were for a particular scenario; but that appears to be a “feature not a bug”. The app will later show you a running total of the points on the scoreboard.

Thoughts on the game 

We’ve started the campaign, and the games have been pleasant. The first game is admittedly essentially a tutorial – which is fine – but don’t judge the game based on that first experience.  The decision making gets markedly more interesting as early as game 2.  It does make me wonder a bit if the game could have been jumpstarted slightly; maybe introducing a few elements in the rules and letting you have at least some interesting things to do right off the bat.

The games that we’ve played so far have been interesting and each game seems to add on a new layer – but thus far the whole game has remained fairly light and repetitive – as every chapter we’ve played so far just feels like a variation on a theme.  If you’ve played My city, My Island or Sagrada Legacy – I’d say it’s similar to that progression.   This is not necessarily a negative or positive thing – just a statement on how the game has played out so far.  

One thing that has kept us from playing more chapters is that the player count is fixed.  Once you start a campaign, you are seemingly locked into that player count.  I suppose you could just make up scores for the player not present (or maybe have them never score and just be in last place in all scoring events) – so if your group has a volatile attendance record, you might want to consider a different campaign as Divinus doesn’t seem to allow for someone to skip a night.  Between family commitments, sportsball games, work travel, game conventions, birthday dinners, and spouses being sick, we’ve had a decent stretch where one of the four of us has been absent; and that has really killed the steam behind the game for the group.  

I should note that I found the rules to be a bit vague at times.  There are a fair number of questions and answers at BGG, and blissfully, most of them have appropriate spoiler tags on them.  The biggest issue for me starting out in Divinus was that the rules are super unclear about the stickers.  You’ll gain stickers for all sorts of things, but man, it was hard figuring out what to do with them.  (Also, be very careful with the stickers – a few of them seem to have very little adhesive on them, and if they don’t stick – well, you’ll have to come up with some sort of workaround – or have extra sticker paper around to handwrite replacement stickers).

I think I have found updated rules on BGG – but honestly I shouldn’t have to go there. The app should tell me exactly what to do.  It does tell me to go get certain stickers, but then it doesn’t tell me where to place them (or where I am allowed to place them). Frustratingly, the rules don’t really tell you either.  Additionally, it would be nice for the app to remind you of certain things.  For instance, we missed the part about where to place the location stickers – they must go on sacred space tiles.  This is printed clearly in the rules, and we missed it.  But… if the app is telling us to get the stickers, why not just add in a phrase like:  “place the location sticker on a tile with a sacred space”.  

We have not seen any hiccups with the app saving out info- it hasn’t rebooted or lost any data.  For the most part, it does what it needs to do.  There are plenty of reports of issues with earlier builds, but it appears that those have all been ironed out with updates.  When you download the app, it forces you to check for updates, so at least you should feel confident that you have the most updated version when you play.

There is a lot of reading to be done from the app.  The story is mostly meted out in bits as you finish quests and at the start/end of scenarios.  I don’t like the way that there is no way to go back in the app.  You can’t go back to re-read anything, so it’s quite easy to miss a chunk of the story because you accidentally double clicked on something or you were answering an email while someone read the blurb to you and then moved on.  There are plenty of confirmation screens to make sure that you aren’t putting in the wrong information; but once you have passed a screen, there is no going back ever.  I’m not a computer guy, but it feels like it would be not too hard to allow for a “Back” button.

There is one other foible of the app that I feel is worth mentioning.    At the end of each scenario, the app calculates scores, but weirdly, you never get a screen that shows you how you did in that particular scenario.  You can sort of infer it when it tells you turn order – as it tends to be in what we think is reverse score order.  But with all the click and confirmation screens, you think there’d be a screen that just showed you how players did in this particular game.  It’s fairly anticlimactic to just have the game end, without you knowing your results, and just finding out the turn order for the next game.  We have had Divinus sessions end without people really knowing how they did that day, and it’s just a weird way to end the night.  All you get is the next turn order, which we think is just in reverse score order – but we never see the scores.  It just asks us if we want to pack up.  

And while I’m on turn order – it’s super frustrating to have the app tell you the turn order once at the beginning and then not refer to it anywhere in the app NOR is there any place for you to refer to it.  And, before you laugh and say how can you not remember the turn order – we were constantly playing out of order.  Sure, we could have picked up our stuff and moved so that we were sitting in clockwise order; but in our group, we all have our favorite seat, and we’re not going to get up and move in between two consecutive chapters.  We did end up using extra dice to make a turn order track on the board, but seriously – why isn’t there a simple chit or card to help people remember turn order?!

There has also been at least one case where I feel like the app used different tiebreak rules than what is written in the rules; but without a scenario ending scoreboard nor any way to go back, it’s hard to tell.  But at least once, we expected player D to win (as he was earlier in turn order) but player J won instead.  In the end, the argument is moot as the app does what the app does and as it clearly tells you about every other screen, everything is irrevocable.

Our group has fallen down the usual lines – the two that love app games have enjoyed this and they feel that the app works well.  Lucky Duck definitely makes great games with app integration, and this is definitely another candidate to fit into that group.   The two that don’t care for apps still don’t care for them.  I am one of those people, though I can appreciate that the app takes care of a lot of the grunt work in the record keeping and whatnot.  I would rather have the app do it than have to track all the points and stuff by hand.  Also, the thought of a large analog book to have all the stories and instructions for all the numbered locations would be a beast.  Much better to just have the app tell you what happens – as long as you remember to scan in the tiles that have the stickers on them!

As we are in the midst of our campaign, it’s hard to give a rating yet – but the games I have played have been enjoyable.  As I mentioned earlier, if you have liked My City, Sagrada Legacy or even Queensdale, this may be your sort of campaign – you’ll get to work in the familiar confines of the tile laying/map building game each scenario with some changes thrown in each time to make it a little different.  We haven’t seen many wild swings or unexpected rules yet – but again, we haven’t completed the game (and even if we had, I’d probably not tell you for spoiler-y reasons).   For groups with a stable player roster that is looking for an iterating game series, this is worth looking into.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor