Tholos (2021)

Overview

Participate in the construction of the Tholos of Delphi, the temple that marks the center of the universe marked by Zeus and built inside the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia. As a builder, face your opponent in a duel and achieve the greatest influence within its sacred construction. May the gods be propitious to you!

Tholos is a game of majorities for two players with high interaction. On a turn, you take one of two actions:

Take stones of one color from the quarry into your workshop, with each workshop holding at most three stones. You can take up to three stones of your color (black/white), up to two neutral stones (gray), or one stone of your opponent (white/black). Play any stone from your workshop onto the game board. The board has seven locations, each with a unique power, and each location can have a column of at most five stones. If you place a stone of your color in a location, then you take the special action associated with that location, e.g., moving the top stone of a column to another location, moving a stone from the opponent's workshop to your workshop, placing a second stone from your workshop, or returning a played stone to the quarry.

When all seven columns have five stones on them, the game ends and players receive points for each column where they have more stones than the opponent — but this isn't necessarily a good thing. When you score a column, you receive 1 point for each stone of your color, 3 points for each stone of the opposing color, and -2 points for each neutral stone. each column awards points to the player who has the most stones of their color in that column.

In the advanced mode of Tholos, you place one or more ornament tiles on the game board, each in a different location. Each ornament tile has a power that changes the rules of the game, such as activating the power of a location with gray stones, awarding a column to the player with fewer stones than the opponent, or raising the maximum number of stones in the location's column to seven.