God of War: The Board Game Design Diary 3 – Menace Track and Synergy Track – by Fabio Cury

Hello! Fábio Cury, one of the designers for God of War: The Board Game, here today to talk to you about two fundamental game mechanics of our upcoming board game: the Synergy Track and the Menace Track.

A very important aspect of God of War is how Kratos’ and Atreus’ bond grows as the game develops and how they work together. To represent this, in the board game, we’ve created the Synergy Track.

As the game progresses and the track advances, our heroes will be able to add new cards to their action deck, increase their hand limits, and level up. When the latter two happen, the heroes must choose whom amongst them will increase their hand limit or who will level up, as these rewards are few and hard to come by. This makes for very interesting decisions between the heroes as they must decide who needs what the most!

Now that we’ve gone through the Synergy track and its juicy rewards, let’s take a moment to talk about how you can gain synergy.

There are a few ways of gaining synergy points to collect these powerful rewards, but the most reliable source of synergy is through the Synergy Die. Whenever a monster is killed and has suffered damage from both Kratos and Atreus, the heroes may roll this die. So, it is very important for the heroes to coordinate and work closely together if they want to synergize and consequently evolve.

Since we’ve talked about how the heroes improve throughout the scenarios, we should also discuss how the difficulty escalates as the scenario progresses. As the enemies take their actions, some enemy action cards will represent the scenario being played. These cards are the main way the Menace Track will be increased, though there may be others depending on the scenario being played.

But just how menacing is this track? Well, it depends on how far you’ve advanced it! Some effects are small, such as activating Monsters another time right away. But others become far more dangerous, such as drawing additional monster behavior cards each round. This means that the enemies will be even more active and the tension will escalate considerably from that point onward.

Two effects are the most dangerous of all, though.

The first is on the 14^th threshold of the Menace Track, when a Boss spawns on the board! These powerful creatures can really hinder the heroes’ progress and make for the most challenging of foes. The second and worst effect of all is if you ever reach the 20^th and final threshold of the track. Then, the scenario has overwhelmed our heroes and they have lost.

As we’ve just read above, the Synergy and Menace tracks both are the key mechanisms through which the game escalates. The former helping the heroes while the latter hinders them. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this small glimpse into God of War: The Board Game! Stay tuned for more to come!

God of War: The Board Game is coming to Gamefound on April 17th, 3 pm EST! Make sure to follow the campaign here.

Read other Design Diaries here:

The Game’s Lore, by Alex Olteanu

From Screen to Tabletop, by Patrick Fernandes