Empire of the Gods is a nice departure from your usual casual game. It’s based around a card game paradigm… but it’s really a sort of strategy board game. Immediately, this makes it stand out from the crowd of Luxor, Bejeweled, Mystery Case Files and Diner Dash clones. However, it cannot escape the super-trendy Egypt theme that is plaguing casual gaming (get it - Egypt… plague - it’s hilarious, trust me).

However, that’s not really an issue because Empire of the Gods takes its theme, integrates it to the gameplay and looks good doing it.

The goal in Empire of the Gods is to meet certain quotas. You have four categories: faith, power, life and gold. Each level, you will have to achieve a certain amount of each of these. This is done by playing your cards. Each level, you start with points already in each of the categories… and by spending a point from one stack, you are able to transfer two points to another.

It’s a very simple idea, trading points around to boost your categories, but before too long it gets pretty hard to keep track of what the best to move to make at a certain time is. Complicating the process are bonus cards that cost multiple points to play. Playing them can boost categories extra and provide random effects and playing them well becomes the key to gameplay very quickly.

The game can be a bit dry, so be warned. If the idea of a straight card/point strategy game doesn’t appeal to you now, it won’t after you’ve played Empire of the Gods. But for anyone who likes to exercise their noggin a bit, this is an interesting way to give it your brain a workout.

Click here to play Empire of the Gods!