Add a divine element to your games of 7 Wonders Duel with the Pantheon expansion! Pantheon enables you to recruit deities from five different ancient Mediterranean cultures to become patrons of your developing city. Each god or goddess offers a powerful blessing such as fabulous wealth, military fortitude, or the means to thwart your opponent’s plans. Grand Temple cards make the game’s final Age intensely competitive by offering unprecedented points to you if you devote your city to divine concerns, and two new Wonders offer pathways towards victory by courting the favour of the gods.

Divine Natures

Ancient Greeks and Romans believed that in order to receive a divine blessing, you had to give the god something in return, some sort of offering or vow. So it goes with the Pantheon expansion: if you want a god’s favor, you have to make an offering. During Age I, you collect Mythology tokens, which allow you to choose which deities have a place in the Pantheon, and Offering tokens, which help you court those deities’ attention. Then, in Ages II and III, you can activate a god or goddess in the Pantheon instead of taking a card from the structure. To do so, you pay whatever that god or goddess demands from you in offerings and place him or her next to your city.

With Isis on your side, you can use a card from the discard pile to construct one of your Wonders for free. Zeus, whose nod determines what happens and what does not, enables you to discard any single card from the structure that you want, as well as any Mythology or Offering tokens on it. The Phoenician goddess Tanit, whose people were renowned for trade, fills your coffers with twelve pieces of gold. Enki, the Sumerian god of crafts, technology, and creation, lets you choose one of two progress tokens. Minerva’s ability to keep the conflict pawn from entering your territory may not instantly bring you victory, but it can save you from military defeat.
Ritual Spaces

Age III introduces another aspect of ancient religion: the ritual space. When playing with Pantheon, instead of incorporating three Guilds into the card structure, you add in three Grand Temples. Each Grand Temple belongs to a different Mediterranean culture. If you have the favor of a god or goddess from that culture, you can build the temple for free. For example, having Isis by your side enables you to build the Egyptian temple; with Enki, you can build the Mesopotamian one.

A single Grand Temple is worth five victory points, but two together are worth twelve, and if you can manage to build three in your city, you’ll earn twenty-one victory points for them. This echoes the polytheism common across the ancient Mediterranean, where many cultures borrowed deities from each other. Isis became popular in Imperial Rome, Aphrodite is very similar to Ishtar and Astarte, Minerva is in many ways a Roman version of the Greek Athena. Moreover, focusing too much on one god and neglecting the others was thought to lead to trouble. In Pantheon, therefore, activating multiple gods and creating a city full of Grand Temples to them is among the best ways to achieve victory.
Create Your Pantheon

From the time it was founded in the third century BCE, Alexandria’s people worshipped Egyptian, Roman, and Greek gods. A native of that legendary city might even visit a Greek temple one day, then an Egyptian shrine the next. Roman soldiers in Greece and the Near East worshipped the native gods of the area they occupied alongside their own gods. As you choose and activate gods in Pantheon, you’ll be emulating these syncretic religious traditions and echoing the history of the ancient Mediterranean, where numerous cultures came together and combined to form something truly great.

Contents

One Pantheon board
Fifteen Divinity cards, five grand temple cards, and one Gate card
Two Wonder cards
Seventeen tokens
One Minerva pawn
One Score notepad
One Rulebook
One Game Aid

2 Players
Ages 10+
Playing Time 30 Minutes


Released: 25 October 2016