Odysseus: I expected a shipwreck and reached Ithaca convinced

I had been warned. A few voices, dropped across game tables and conversations, had told me it would fall flat, polished but hollow, a mythological coat of paint over not very much. So I opened the box dragging my feet, all but certain I was there to confirm the verdict. A handful of games later, including a good few solo runs, I owe it a mea culpa: I came in negative, I walk away convinced. As long as you know who it is for.

Playtime: 25 min · Age: 8+ · Players: 1 to 5 · Publisher: Gigamic · Designers: Johannes Goupy and Matthieu Verdier · Artist: Régis Torres

The Mediterranean in twenty-five minutes

The pitch fits in a sentence: you bring Ulysses home to Ithaca, and the sea does everything it can to stop you. Sirens, the cyclops, gods in a shifting mood, every game replays the great stations of the Odyssey under Athena's on-and-off protection.

Régis Torres delivers art direction that is readable and warm, never cluttered, setting the scene without you needing a mythology dictionary open beside the board. On opening, it smells of a clean, tidy little game rather than a grand epic machine. That is exactly what it is, and that is where all its honesty lies.

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How you play

At its heart the game is tile collection, and it is done with taste. On your turn, you take a tile from one of the two ends of the boat. By removing it, you reveal the hidden tiles at the centre, and that curiosity earns you owl tokens. You then place your tiles to build four coloured tracks, and this is where the flavour sits: placing a tile triggers a power that advances another colour. Chained well, your turn kicks off a small chain reaction (the moment when everything clicks gives that quiet but real pleasure of a good engine game).

The owls are your currency of flexibility.

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They open up track choices you would not otherwise have had, or buy you objectives for the end of the game. If you have already circled around Akropolis or The Hanging Gardens, you are on familiar ground: same Gigamic stable, same feel of clean collection where every tile counts. And for the evenings without a partner, an Automa runs the solo mode and ramps up the opposition crescendo, which is no mere façade: it holds up.

What lands, what grates

What lands, first. The game is stripped down in the best sense of the term, nothing superfluous, the rules are grasped in a single explanation and the decisions stay tense from start to finish. The short format makes it a formidable machine for stacking up games, and the power engine, without reinventing anything, is genuinely satisfying. The two reviews I cross-checked both hand it a clear "loved it", and after my own games I understand why.

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What grates, next, and it is only fair to say so: Odysseus invents nothing mechanically. Collection with cascading powers is something you have met before, and the expert player looking for depth will hit the ceiling fast. The theme, as readable as it is, stays an elegant wrapper more than a real narrative: do not expect to live the Odyssey, you cross it like a postcard. These are not flaws, they are boundaries. It all comes down to who sits at the table.

Verdict

Here is a game I would have been wrong to bury on the strength of rumour. Odysseus is not a great connoisseur's game and it does not claim to be. It is a well-built family title, calibrated to the millimetre for what it aims at: a family on a Tuesday evening, a public game library after something solid and quick, or a gateway table where you want people to taste collection and power engines before tackling heavier games. For that audience, it is a clear yes. For the expert player chasing strategic vertigo, it is a stopover, not a destination. Know where you shelve your box, and you will not regret the voyage.