Yeah, it's that bad. It could make a person go all the way from Polytheism to horrible godlessness, ignoring the monotheism option altogether.

What a horrible, horrible game. Imagine a game in which you start knowing only 40% of your objectives and not only that, for a long part of the game you can't really act towards your known objectives since all your opponents will see which objective it is and will definitely hurt you.

This is the Age of Gods. There are 24 different creatures on the map (6 kinds of each of the 4 possible sizes for a race, 1-piece, 2-piece, 3-piece and 4-piece). Each player "has" 4 creatures that will score him points in the end of the game depending on how many territories they control. In the beginning of the game, you only know the bigger one, the 4-piece-sized one, in a card that is (very) secret information. You can't really act with it to expand its territory because everyone else will see it's yours and try to hurt you. I don't think there's really a way that a player can stand against even two players that attack him, much less all the opponents.

Well, one could propose that you could always bluff and move with other 4-piece-sized creatures on the map, in other to throw your enemies off. The thing is, the one you choose could end up being another player's creature, so you can actually be HELPING them (since they obviously won't be attacking that creature, and will spend their turn making it stronger).

So it seems that the "safe thing" to do is act with the other, smaller, creatures, that belong to nobody. But, of course, a lot of those creatures (or all of them, in a 6-player game) will be "distributed" for the players in the future turns of the game. So you just used the lizard-man in order to hide the fact that you actually had the humans, in a future turn (when players receive their 3-piece race) that strong lizard-man may have gone to your opponent. Hooray. This goes for the 2-piece and the 1-piece creatures as well.

This, being mainly a battling game, the combat is terribly boring. Roll a die, if you get 3 or more, you win. Wow, what storm and stress! Of course, for added excitement(oh, it's just too much!), if the defending creature is in a fortification (lavishly depicted by a small gray wooden circle), you have to roll a 4. If the creature has been "fortified" (or upgraded, or whatever), then add a +1 modifier (this will probably happen near the end of the game, when each player's races are more obvious).

You have 24 different fantasy races, ranging from giants to centaurs to fairies to pirates to necromancers, but since they have absolutely no specific abilities in combat they might as well be letters of the alphabet (I'd actually find a game like that quite funny, "my G attacks your M, hah, it stands no chance"... what a pun-rich environment that would be!). The map is quite varied in its illustration, with all sorts of terrain, but it makes absolutely no difference. Fighting in the forest is the same as in a desert or a mountain. It could've been a sheet of white paper with lines drawn across to form a sort of grid, as far as actual gameplay is concerned.

The cardplay aspect of the game (which is actually slightly intricate, so I won't try to explain it here) is probably the only salvageable thing in this design. A lot of the powers in the cards, though, are compromised, again, by the bluffing aspect of the match. You can only help your creatures in very discrete ways (unless it's closer to the end of the game) and most of the powers are really strong.

The art of the cards is nice, but I think the board looks ugly. The creatures are too cartoony (unlike the cards) and sometimes hard to tell which is which (since there are so many of them and the small icons don't really stand out from one another). The colors are all oranges-and-greens, quite unsightly, and the insert is absolutely stupid: almost a quarter of it is to hold one regular-sized die (as if it was made of glass, or crystal, and could break), and no different compartments for each one of those 24 races. Because of this, our setup took almost 10 minutes: separating the all-too-similar chips and distributing them in the map according to what the manual thinks is a fair distribution, totally asymmetric with a few 4-piece units being all close together and a few totally isolated from other "numerous" races.

From what little I explained of the rules (specially from combat), one can see this is a fairly light affair. It takes, however, from one hour to 90 minutes, players just doing pretty much the same thing over and over.

Also, did I mention that there are very unbalanced powers? In the beginning of the game each player receives a special power... one fellow player got a +1 in EVERY COMBAT FOR THE ENTIRE GAME. No other power distributed even came close to that... The cards were like that as well, like with a few putting more goblins on the "reserve box" (making it possible for it to go over the original limit) when I can't even imagine a situation where the map would be absolutely run over with goblins with the other players allowing that to happen... Totally useless.

Overall, I really enjoy this game and I give it a B+
(Huh... wait... what? I think I must've gone mad... To actually spend more of my time with this game, even to sit down and write a review, is pure insanity.)

Edit: the B+ is a JOKE, BTW. Some people didn't get it, so I'm adding this little edit. I give this game a 3. And that's not out of 5, it's out of 10, ok?