Area control games have a real problem where one player gets crushed early and then spends the rest of the game as a spectator, and Ankh is the first one I’ve played where the designers seem to have genuinely solved that instead of just apologizing for it in the rulebook. The devotion track, where you can win by racing to complete a set of monument pledges instead of controlling the most regions, means a player who’s losing the battle map still has a real path to victory, and that changes how every single fight on the board gets negotiated.

Combat itself is a battlefield card system, you commit strength cards face down and reveal simultaneously, and reading your opponents’ likely commits based on what they’ve played before becomes its own skill, closer to a bluffing game than the dice-chucking mess a lot of area control combat turns into. The god powers are asymmetric and genuinely different from each other, Anubis’s death mechanic plays completely differently from Ra’s temple-focused strategy, and that variety kept my group’s plays from feeling repetitive even after a dozen games.

Miniature quality is CMON doing what CMON does, gorgeous sculpts, the kind of table presence that gets photographed and posted, though as usual you’re paying a premium for that and the insert doesn’t organize any of it well once punched.

Where it stumbles for me is player count, three players is clearly the tightest and most balanced experience, five starts to feel chaotic and slower than the box promises, with more downtime between your turns than I’d like. New players also underestimate the devotion track their first game or two and get blindsided by someone quietly winning without ever controlling the map.

A genuinely fresh take on a tired genre. Four stars, best at three, worth the premium price for the design alone.