On a recent Sunday, my friend Sawyer picked me up to play board games with his friend Josh. Josh was visiting from Texas and it was a chilly night in Durham, NC. I had played an online board game with Josh and Sawyer before but never met Josh in person.

This game would be played in the hotel lobby. It was a nice-looking cozy lobby decorated for the holidays, but everytime the door opened a freezing draft would blow directly towards us.

The options for board games were Ankh: Gods of Egypt or a long Lord of the Rings game (I think War of the Ring). We chose Ankh as we thought we could finish it. Josh and Sawyer had played Ankh the night before with someone else but they discovered afterward that they had accidentally cheated in several ways.

The first bit of conversation naturally centered around religion as it was the first night of Hanukkah and my family had just lit the menorah. Hanukkah is about celebrating a miracle where a single days worth of oil lasted eight days. My understanding is that the temple where this miracle took place had been under attack and somehow or other they ended up with only enough pure consecrated oil to last a day and that while they had plenty of impure oil, the process to turn that impure oil into pure consecrated oil would take eight days. So I have questions… Is it impossible for the impure oil to burn or is it just against the traditions, the scriptures, and the word of God? Because I’ve been living on this here planet among humans for awhile now and I’ve seen plenty of evidence that if something has to happen on the down-low, it doesn’t take a miracle for that to occur. It’s entirely plausible that somebody was feeding that fire some impure oil when no one else was watching. Heck, maybe multiple somebodies fed the fire at different times and didn’t know about each other so each of them was still surprised to see it last so long.

There’s a similar sort of story with Jesus and fishes and bread where a miracle of faith allows them all to be fed. Really, couldn’t it just be that people understood they needed to only take a nibble in order for it to be fair? And so the people nibbled and said “Whew! I’m full to burst!” and passed it on. So in my mind one could re-imagine what “faith” means here and the wonderment of the story is still intact. If we think of faith as a sort of self-imposed hypnosis then the nibblers of the fish and bread are actually able to convince themselves that they are full despite all evidence to the contrary. This seems to me to be a more likely and yet still powerful phenomenon when scaled up to a community of religion.

So the game of Ankh has players taking on the roles of Gods of Egypt. The board is a square map of hexagon tiles split up into sections by rivers. On each players turn, they can take two different actions of four possible options: move fighters (called figures), gain followers, gain fighters, gain ankh ability. You have to take your two actions in the order I listed. One of the fighters that you start out with is your god. They can’t die and they can grow more powerful with some ankh abilities. Ankh abilities and other things cost followers. Sometimes you can sacrifice followers for an upper hand.

I would say what stood out to me immediately was the idea that I could hide the number of followers that I had. The sacrifice I mentioned is a bidding war so it pays to know how many followers the other players have sometimes so you can outbid them without overbidding. So I decided to try to get a lot of followers (without really understanding what I would do with them) and try to trick Sawyer and Josh about how many I had. I thought a good strategy would be to leave most of them visible on the board while having about a third of them in my pocket. I ended up having two regions of the map that were completely uncontested after the first round of fighting. With those regions I steadily gained the victory points necessary to take a commanding lead. Sawyer was able to use an Ankh ability that gave him double points in a way that seemed very powerful and I wished I had gotten it too but by the time I understood it I wouldn’t have been helped by it. At every interaction I tried to figure out what the most beneficial action would be. My god had the ability to use two combat moves for one round of combat and that proved to be a great power.

Sawyer was able to get to the win condition on the same turn as me which meant that the winner was decided by what the proper order for scoring is. I think it was widely accepted that I had the better claim for victory but it was a fun tactic to go for an ambiguous ending.

It turns out Josh had noticed I was pocketing some followers and was trying to keep count so I guess my subterfuge was not terribly effective though it was the main thing I was focused on over the course of the game.

One last note is that while the hotel lobby staff were accomodating with a free soda for Sawyer I was a bit alarmed by a story one of them told about falling asleep to the point of dreaming while driving her car around the School of Science and Math. I think she said something about waking up fully bent over the passenger seat and I had a hard time imagining that but I certainly hope she’s exaggerating a little.

Hail to thee, Amun-Ra!