An Age Contrived: Folklore & Pilgrimage preview— The gods take a hike

I’m mad at Chris Matthew. Like I said in my review, I quite enjoy my time with An Age Contrived, but the Folklore & Pilgrimage expansion fills in some holes I didn’t notice were there until I played with it, and now I’ve got to wait until it’s out to add it to my copy. There are the two additional gods, which are nice and all, but the real stars of the show are the titular Folklore and Pilgrimage modules. They’ve both got their own things going on, but the first thing that strikes you in the rules explanation is that they both give you something to do with a charge channel token benefit when yours is already ready to go, which assuages that twinge of guilt I always feel when I’m being mildly inefficient in a euro like this.

Our first module, folklore, has players priming artifacts and dropping them at the end of movements to play one of their folklore cards, which get souped up when dropped on another player’s. In the base game, you generally didn’t care too much about where the other players were going other than perhaps trying to optimally drop a bridge or avoid getting blocked out of a pillar if you’re going that route that game, but Folklore makes the god movement part of the game much more interactive and interesting. Love it.

The other universal module, Pilgrimage, has the players sending a believer on a hiking trip on the brand name Mt. Olympus. There’s a whole host of places to deploy your energy on this board, making the game that much less claustrophobic at higher player counts. You can give your little guy a giddyup with a channel charge and have him detour to a shrine for its benefit, but the real crunch here is navigating the race to the top for its hefty chunk o’ points without having to take the speed hit for running into the hurdles at each tier first while taking pit stops to take advantage of the huge shrine vistor benefits. Both modules also introduce doubler tokens and scoring cards, which do just what the names imply, attaching to any energy bound outside of an achievement so it counts twice and buffing one part of your end game score (eg. unlocked energy pairs).

The new gods, Chronari and Valimond are also both interesting: Chronari can run their device backwards and deconstruct a monument section to construct the top one of another, which is wild), and while Valimond is certainly less dramatic, he can teleport into the pool to count as two energy when buying new tiles for your device, and generates free track or god mini movement when buying tiles with the people icon. After playing with both, I’m just as excited to stuff them into my base game as I am the two other modules. Whats more, the player aids have been revised to include all the new modules and the minor errata so they’re still the top-flight condensed rules booklets that they were in tge base game. Everything’s just as gorgeous as it was in the base game, so go and check out the Folklore and Pilgrimage Kickstarter!

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