Lost Cities designer will pack epic Greek classic The Iliad into a half-hour board game for two players
Ichor and Iliad are the first two in a new line of 2-player board games in the Mythos Collection.
Two new board games from storied designer Reiner Knizia will launch a collection of two-player titles inspired by classic mythological tales. Ichor and Iliad will lead off the releases with a pair of sub 40-minute board games exploring battles between humans and gods.
The Mythos Collection is the brainchild of Bitewing Games, the tabletop publisher who most previously worked with Knizia on the upcoming Euro board game duo Cascadero and bite-sized Cascadito. If you’re not familiar with Knizia, he’s one of the more prolific tabletop designers behind Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates and Modern Art. A real workhorse creator, his list of credits contains equal measure of unique passion projects and family-weight and smaller titles you probably never looked at twice.
Iliad will be a tile-placement board game that requires both players to strategise their use of more powerful tiles as the board becomes a pitched battle between the Greeks and Trojans. With that mytho-historical conflict as a background, opponents will take turns placing tiles on a 6x6 board in a fashion that the publisher calls reminiscent of Samurai, Blitzkrieg and Caesar. Winning requires tactical allocation of your best units and knowing when a battle is lost and when you can swoop in for a surprise upset victory.
Ichor, by comparison, plays with a more abstract premise and set of mechanics. Likened to Santorini by the publisher, Ichor tasks two players with being the first to deploy all of their tokens by moving unique figures across the board - Greek gods such as Zues, Athena and Aphrodite on one side and the monstrous Cyclops, Siren, Minotaur and other mythical beasts on the other. All pieces have a powerful one-time-use ability in addition to their rook-like movement. Simple to learn but packing a lot of depth, Ichor is apparently the board game where the whole idea for the Mythic Collection first took root.
“A few years ago, I heard an interview where Reiner Knizia mentioned that publishers aren’t interested in 2-player games, so he doesn’t often design them. This baffled me,” said Bitewing Games’ Nick Murray. “It started with me asking Reiner to show me his best 2-player designs, and even encouraging him to design new games that we would happily support. Since then, we have assessed roughly 20 designs from the Good Doctor ranging from dead-simple, decades-old abstract strategy games to brand new, surprisingly complex experiences.”
Both Ichor and Iliad will launch a joint Kickstarter campaign in late June to fund physical boxed versions. Bitewing Games expects both board games to begin shipping to backers in the first few months of 2025. Ichor was illustrated by Tyler Miles Lockett and Brigette Indelicato, and Iliad’s artists are Harry Conway and Brigette Indelicato. Future titles in the Mythos Collection are still underdevelopment, but it seems as though the initiative’s future will partly rely on the success of these first two releases.
