Base price: $20.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Fantasy Realms: Greek Legends was provided by WizKids.

Greek Month-ology continues! I have a few of these in my back pocket and I’ve been meaning to get to them prior to things getting hectic (American Tabletop Awards launch, Gen Con, my Actual Job). We will see how the month finishes up, especially with PAX East on the horizon. First time for everything! In the meantime, we’ve got more from the Fantasy Realms crowd. WizKids has been making a number of these in the past few years: I think I saw Star Trek, Marvel, and now Greek Mythology. Fantasy Realms is a classic, so it’s definitely worth the Love Letter / Monopoly-esque pivot to trying to make licensed versions to appeal to a wider audience. I still need to try the other ones; the Star Trek one was a bit too TNG-centric for my tastes, but I can give it another go. In the meantime, let’s see what Greek Legends has for us!

In Fantasy Realms: Greek Legends, players dive deep into Greek mythology to see what combos they can produce! Like the classic Fantasy Realms, each turn is simple: draw a card and discard a card, trying to come up with the best seven-card combo that you can play. The twist is that this time, much like the mythology in question, the afterlife isn’t completely off-limits. People come and go all the time! Orpheus, problematically, among others. Your Afterlife here is a new place for you to discard cards to. For the most part, they’re still readily accessible, but that comes at a cost: at the end of the game, you lose 10 points for every card in your Afterlife! Sometimes it’s better to be alive, I suppose. Not that it matters to some of these characters. So gather your heroes, your gods, your monsters, and just an unbelievable amount of stuff and try to transcend the myth and become a legend. Do you have what it takes to spin your own tale?

Overall: 7.25 / 10

Overall, I like Fantasy Realms: Greek Legends, with some caveats. It’s a sometimes-mixed bag that mostly resolves out to “good”, in my book. There are plenty of high points: first, as you might guess from this whole review series, I’m a big fan of Greek mythology. It’s all messy and dramatic and a dude turning into a shower of gold coins for no particularly discernible reason. A swan that one time. I like the stories and the characters and I like how they’ve influenced an unbelievable amount of downstream Western literature and canon. It’s just neat to see themes with such lasting power and, so, here we are. I also like the art! It’s cartoony without being too much so (a sort of different comic book-style spin on the Mr. Cuddington style seen in Santorini). I appreciate that they went the Hades route of the Greek gods being a particularly diverse set of individuals; I think that’s fun. Fantasy Realms, at its core, is also extremely easy to pick up and play and a quick play, to boot. Neither of those things have changed with Greek Legends, and I appreciate that. Modify the game as you want, but don’t mess with the core loop of some things.

Where some issues pop up is around the Afterlife, since it adds an entirely new interaction mechanic for the game. It’s not bad, per se, but only certain cards can be discarded there, so zeroing in on a viable Afterlife-focused strategy is a lot easier said than done, especially at lower player counts. With fewer players, the game tends to end a bit faster because there are so many cards that may just not lean into your strategy, so they just get left in the center. With more players, there are more cards in hand and more people trying different things (usually), so you see a bit more churn from the Discard Area rather than players just drawing from the deck over and over. I was a bit surprised since the original new edition of Fantasy Realms had a two-player variant that addresses this issue pretty well, but that wasn’t included here. I wonder if that’s due to a weird interaction with the Afterlife or if it was just an oversight. Not sure. I like the concept a lot, but I wonder if the execution needs a little polishing.

All things considered, though, there’s a reason people like Fantasy Realms so much, and I think Greek Legends still gets that core understanding. It’s dead simple to play, has a really easy-to-understand visual language, and it’s quick and fun. There have been a few changes to the system for this one since the categories of cards matter a lot more for certain things (like Quests), but it’s fun to see the different pieces come up as you try to essentially recreate The Odyssey or win the Trojan War or just rescue Eurydice from the Underworld (inadvisable; Orpheus isn’t terribly reliable). I’ve even seen a few cards that I don’t recognize, so I want to go look up those myths now and see what I can find. If you’re looking for a good companion game for fans of Greek mythology, you really like all the takes on Fantasy Realms, or you just want to see how many cards you can dump into the Afterlife and get away with it, you might enjoy Fantasy Realms: Greek Legends as well! It’s neat.

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