Shadows of Forbidden Gods

A really excellent "play as the bad guys" game, with delightful complexity in how everything interacts. Turn based, which I really appreciate. A lot of ways to adjust the difficulty, with the base difficulty being "all of the stories are about the good guys winning, so you'd better have a good reason why this one is different"

Super atmosperic game where you take over the world by covert action and corruption.

No sure why this doesnt get much steam, it's really a hidden gem! It's been a while since I found another great table top strategy games style rehab since Plague Inc. Plus it has more lore potentials and rich narratives than Plague Inc also. On the top of that the mod integration is great! Well...the community is very small though :/. On the downside, this game is still incomplete on many things. Non-human races or settlements are very bland (Elf, orc and dwarfs) I would expect more events and interaction with them. And It definitely would be a waste potential if we can't role play kingdom or settlements and let AI play gods, that will be cool. The thing is, I already see many strategy games skeleton here and there (house, family system like CKs), settlements modifiers and army with rulers. Up to today, rulers are very bare bones, their actions seem not consequential even though you can see THEY ARE doing many things, so this make me wonder how about let players to play rulers? Another thing is I really want to have a watchlist kind of thing? so I can track certain heros and settlements. For now, I have to keep flipping the cursor to recenter at the settlements/heros i am looking at. And, it can be more fun by adding something like a War of Fog thing? For some reasons heros and rulers are too predictable, Maybe only allow you to see their actions if you have certain level of intrigues plus your agent are there, and only globally broadcast heros locations/actions if they are doing something narrative fitting? Like someone is touching the seal, and that trigger your alarm, or allliance/conclaves are established somewhere.... i dont know, something like this. Plus a side note: If you play this game, I would suggest you to flip off the in-game music and just play Elden Ring/GOT/WOT or any western-med-fantasy OST with it, give much better immersion than current in-game music!

Great game! Bit of tactical, turn based gameplay, where you're feeling like an end-game crisis in some other 4x genres out there. God forbid you take a break though, the rules can at times be rather arcane and takes time to relearn, once you've gone through it once before.

Excellent gem of a game. You play as agents of chaos and can achieve apocalypse in a variety of ways. Deep mechanics make it interesting, achievements are attainable, recommend.

Okay so we have quite an obtuse UI that can severly steepen the learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you are presented with a very interesting boardgame-like strategy game with a pretty unique theme. It reminds me a lot of Plague Inc. in the way that you have to operate in the shadows (literally) and keep the "living world" unaware of you as long as possible before unleashing your apocalyptic end game. As I am nearing the end of my first run (which I am not sure I will finish with a "win") I already see things I did wrong and other strategies I could try. This is very much a game about planning the long-con: highly recommended for any boardgame or strategy fan.