Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx Board Game Review
Santorini isn’t a game I’ve really enjoyed a ton. If someone wants to play it I’m going to play it, but I’m VERY poor at the game overall. Still, the concepts and ideas behind the game, including the plethora of God Cards that significantly change how the game is played, have always intrigued me. When Roxley originally reached out to us to help promote the Kickstarter for a cooperative expansion, I was intrigued. I love a great cooperative experience, and wondered if that alone could turn a game I didn’t think much about into a game I desperately wanted to play.
Turns out, I might like just about anything if you slap a cooperative experience on it. In Riddle of the Sphinx, players will use core rules that govern Santorini gameplay, but each page of the campaign book is a new puzzle for the group to complete. Each map will have a number of conditions that need to be met to complete the mission, and further conditions if you want to reach a higher rank of completion. When a scenario is complete, you’ll earn, let’s call it experience, that can be transferred over to a God page where you can use that “experience” to unlock new God abilities for future games.
I love that the new God’s you unlock aren’t simply earned linearly. You can pick where you want to spend the points, and what God’s you want to work towards for unlocking. You might find one God is better for your gameplay style than another, and work towards that. I love the freedom here, and the opportunity to unlock things in new and different ways. There are ways to unlock other things through this God page, but I won’t spoil any of that here.
As we noted above, each scenario has a number of conditions you want to meet – setup instructions are generally pretty consistent one-game to the next, scaling depending on the number of players and even adding in a “wild” pawn to use if playing with specific player counts. General Santorini rules will apply in most cases, unless a scenario specifies otherwise. You can build next to your builder, climb a maximum of one layer up, and jump down any number of layers.
Where things vary is how you’ll earn pieces to use. Pieces are earned in a variety of ways – completing conditions for that scenario, by selecting God cards from a central display, and a few other ways that, again, we won’t spoil here. What pieces you select is pretty important – for example, you need to make sure you have the necessary level-1 building pieces if you have a requirement to build something that is a level-2 or higher! Some powers give you the ability to swap pieces you don’t need with others from the supply, but those are few and far between, so being very careful and strategic in what pieces you collect and when is important!
Ultimately, Riddle of the Sphinx is a book full of puzzles that you and your fellow players will need to figure out. While I’m sure there are a few ways you could tackle each one, once we got out of the introductory scenarios, we felt the tension in each and every game – would we get the pieces we need? How do we use our movement in the most beneficial way? If I hang out on this side and you on that side, can we get everything done? There is a ton of communication required in this game, which could pose a big challenge for some players: the alpha gamer.
Like it or not, Riddle of the Sphinx will be an alpha gamer scenario. If you are unfamiliar, the alpha gamer is the person at the table who directs everyone else in what they should be doing. While that gets annoying in something like Pandemic – where there is a decent amount of forgiveness except in specific situations – it becomes almost a necessity here. More often than not, each and every turn in Riddle of the Sphinx will require some type of conversation amongst players if you hope to achieve as many conditions and score as highly as possible. If you simply want to finish the scenario, mistakes can be made. If you want to earn as much as possible, you’ll need a fairly flawless game.
And that is where one person can dominate the discussions, and it’s worth noting that unless you are playing with a bunch of brilliant minds, this is more than likely going to happen when you play in a group setting. It’s actually why I prefer to play this at 2-Players as it allows a bit more freedom in discussion. With more players, less strategic players, or those that lack the ability to think critically, quickly, will become a warm body at the table as opposed to someone actively engaging in the experience. At least at 2-Players, I know I can pick someone who will play the game well with me.
So let’s come full circle to my original question: can I slap a cooperative campaign on a game I don’t necessarily love, and end up loving it? Yes, it is very possible. Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx has quickly become one of my favorite cooperative experiences I’ve played in the first half of this year, and it’s one we will continue to explore until we’ve finished every condition within every scenario. If you love cooperative experiences but dislike Santorini, this could possibly change your mind like it did mine!