Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition and Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx both arrived at my door February 28th, just in time for weekend!
These were originally on Kickstarter back in April 2023, and promised delivery May 2024: so it’s not quite a year late, but it is pretty late. At least it finally made up! I have been waiting a while for this game: it was #8 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!
I was very excited for Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx (which we’ll just call Riddle of the Sphinx from now on), as it promised to take the base game Santorini and make it into a solo and cooperative experience!
However, Riddle of the Sphinx is an expansion: you must have one of the Santorini base games to play it (for some of the components). This particular Kickstarter offered up the “deluxe” Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition, so that’s the one I backed.
I ended up playing pretty much all weekend, so let’s see how that unraveled! Was this worth the wait?
Day 1: The Game Arrives and Santorini Gets Played!
February 28th, 2025: The package arrives with both games!
The acrylic tokens bag opened up and spread them everywhere … make sure you pick up all yours!
You can’t play Riddle of the Sphinx until you know how to play the base game of Santorini. So, that’s where we started.
This edition has quite a bit of extra stuff.
The white blocks and domes are the key components to the game: these are what gets built on the main board. Those little white blocks have quite the toy feeling!
These blocks are the main pieces that will be shared with Riddle of the Sphinx.
There’s some neat bags with lots of components. A lot of these aren’t necessary for the main game.
But the workers (in the blue bag) are important; they are what moves around the map.
The purple bag has a lot of stuff … that I don’t think you will need until you play a LOT of Santorini and want more content.
The most important piece for the main game is the board (packed upside down).
It looks gorgeous!
There’s even a lazy susan for it to rotate on!
There are some God Cards here (God Cards give each player special powers). We need these cards for the base game, but we will NOT need them for Riddle of the Sphinx.
This is a really nice production. It just looks gorgeous. I probably spent too much money to get the deluxe Pantheon Collector’s Edition, but it looks nice.
The rules are hidden on the bottom of the box!
Normally, I would give rules that take up the whole box an F on the Chair Test, but since the rules are ALL ON ONE SIDE, I am going to give this an A! The rules lay out and are easy to consult!!
These rules are succinct and terse, but still pretty darn clear. The game can be described in one page!
There’s a really nice little “first game set-up” which takes you through your first step or two of Santorini with Demeter vs. Artemis!
As you play your first game (I played Me vs Me), you get a sense how everything works. And the buildings that pop-up look really cool! See above!
At the end of my first game, I felt like I understood the mechanisms! This was a simple abstract strategy game that looks really cool! I see why Santorini has survived in the board game zeitgeist for so long! It’s easy to play, easy to describe, easy to learn, but has tons of interesting and strategic decisions. This is a neat game.
For the record, I do want to mention that it’s not too hard to pack everything back into the box … there’s a little graphic on the side that shows how to do that!
So, I was able to play and learn the base game! I look forward to learning Riddle of the Sphinx tomorrow!
Day 2: Unboxing and First Games of Riddle of the Sphinx
First thing Saturday morning, March 1st, I woke up and was excited to get to Riddle of the Sphinx!
It turns the competitive base game of Santorini into a co-op and solo game!
Riddle of the Sphinx has a weird form factor: see above.
It’s a very wide box that opens like a book: see above (with Coke can for perspective).
The Acrylic tokens replace the cardboard tokens.
Off to the left are the bridges, figures, dice, and cards. I am glad I took a picture of this, because when I went back to repack the game, I had to consult my pictures!
The rulebook … is huge. Not from a length perspective, but huge as in “the form factor of this book is very wide and very tall!“
This rulebook completely fails the Chair Test as it droops over the edge and makes it very hard to consult on the chair next to me. See above.
The standard workaround for rulebooks this big is to put them across TWO CHAIRS, with the spine in the middle. (We first discovered this “workaround” when we looked at Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: see here). This makes it so can consult the rulebook on the chairs next to you. Sigh: this rulebook has a terrible form factor! It’s far too engulfing!
The weird thing is, you almost don’t need the rulebook???? The Book of Riddles (which we’ll discuss below) has an EXCELLENT tutorial built in!
The Book of Riddles (see above) is the main component of this expansion. There are 22 “riddles” in here which the player(s) must solve!
The Book of Riddles throws you into the first game with some pretty pictures and flavor text …
A quick note: we’ll be playing solo, which means we have some weird special rules. We have to have a figure called the “Wanderer” whose sole purpose is to make sure we never do the same action twice in a row!
The Wanderer is the middle guy (we’ll see the Sphinx and other dude later).
Using the Wanderer, the solo player selects an action each turn (one of the four above), but can never choose the same action twice in a row.
The first Scenario is Sunshine and Seashores: see above!
The opposite side of the page has a painfully precise (in a good way) description of how to play the first riddle! This is a complete, step-by-step run-through of a winning game so you can see how all the rules work together! This tutorial is a fantastic way to learn how Riddles work!
The only thing you “really” need from the original Santorini box are the blocks and the workers. That’s it! See above! All that other stuff you saw as I unboxed Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition? Completely useless here!
In fact, I made the mistake of thinking we needed the original board (above right) when I played my first game! Nope!
Riddle of the Sphinx has its own God Cards: see Base Gods above and Friendly Gods below!
There’s even a notion of Blessings that comes out in later games!
The Gods are a little different here; you kind of use them up and throw them away!!
The Gods give you powers, but if you complete their quest (at the bottom of the card), you (usually) get a new piece you can build. Why is that so important?
Riddle of the Sphinx is a game about scarcity. You don’t have all the pieces you need to build your towers and edifices, so you have to earn them as you play. By having Gods complete their quests, you get new pieces so you can build as you need to.
The coins on the map describe what you need to build: see above as I need to build a level 1 building underneath the coin to get it!
And then I do!
The coin goes to the top (or bottom) of the page to denote you have “finished” that subgoal. Usually, you need to get all Gold coins to complete the Riddle, and all the Silver coins give you extra help/bonuses.
See above as we build everything, as we try to understand how to solve a Riddle! It’s all about building towers when pieces are scarce! You have to earn the pieces to build what you need!
I need to be clear here; this tutorial is great! I jumped right in and was able to start playing right away! The tutorial held my hand for the first game, and then threw me into my second game. And I was felt so comfortable jumping in after that!
See above for an example of how good that Tutorial is!
After the Tutorial is Riddle 1! As I jumped into Riddle 1, they added some new rules: The Sphinx’s game!
The Sphinx’s Game allows you to roll the dice and “hopefully” get one of the gems! If you get a gem, you get free piece to build! If you fail (because the gem is gone), you lose a worker!
Just like our Tutorial, the game board does a real good job describing set-up on the same page as the Riddle itself. It’s interesting, I don’t think I ever looked in the rulebook for any rules in the first few games: almost everything I needed was presented in the set-ups of the various riddles.
Look how great this looks: see above.
At the end of Day 1, I unboxed Riddle of the Sphinx and played through two scenarios solo; this gave me the sense of how everything worked.
This is a puzzle; you have to figure out when to build, when to recruit god powers, when to finish a god quest (so you can get more pieces), and when to finish the Riddle (which usually means building a tower on a gold piece place!).
Day 2: Campaign and More Play
So, Riddle of the Sphinx is kind of a campaign game. Included in the rulebook are two pages per campaign: The Adventure Map and the Constellation Tree.
The Adventure Map has you “mark” off bubbles on how well you did when you finished a puzzle. (There are multiple conditions you can satisfy, see below).
See above as there are Silver, Gold, and Heroic (above) conditions you can satisfy. Godlike not pictured.
The bubbles you mark off in the Adventure Map corresponds to how many bubbles you can mark off in the Constellation Tree! See above! Basically, the Constellation Tree unlocks what are called Friendly Gods! The more Friendly Gods you have, the more control you have when you attempt a puzzle (remember, God powers are pivotal to doing the riddles, especially if the powers are useful).
Rather than sully my pristine books, I went to make a copy of the two pages … well, it’s too big for my copier, but you CAN just print them directly from Roxley’s web site. So, to play a campaign, you need both pages (see above). After every Riddle, you mark off how many achievements you did! And then you can “maybe” unlock a Friendly God or two!
I used a pencil (see above): Warning! You should probably use a red marker or something VERY distinct. It’s REALLY HARD to tell what you marked with a pencil. Can you tell above? Even zoomed in, I can barely read it! Learn my mistake, use a more “colorful” writing implement so you can see the marks.
So, the first part of my Sunday was getting the Campaign maps marked up for my first few games, when I headed into more puzzles!
At one point, the Sphinx even made an appearance!
By the end of Day 3, I had played 6 Riddles and started my way into a solo campaign.
This is a puzzle; make no mistake about it. It’s more puzzle than game. I loved it. You may not.
Cooperative Play
So, this is different week: I am at Dice Tower West and not with my normal gaming group. I brought Riddle of the Sphinx with me to play it cooperatively with “some people”. My core game group and I have a base level of trust and respect, so cooperative games are easy for us to jump into. Sometimes, it’s a little harder to jump into a cooperative game with people you don’t know. How did that go for us with Riddle of the Sphinx?
I met a real nice fellow named Charles. He and I had a very frank discussion about the Alpha Player problem before we started the game. I worry, since this is more of a puzzle than a game, that Riddle of the Sphinx might drift towards having Alpha Players take over.
From our very frank discussion, we made it clear that we would be supporting each other but still occasionally having suggestions: no Alpha Playering. I admit, I had never thought of this solution to the Alpha Player problem: just talk about it and agree to not do Alpha Player each other. And you know what? That worked fine!
Charles and I started from scratch and played the first 4 riddles (plus tutorial) in about 2 hours. We had a good time and got some riddles done. (Since I had played solo previously, I was able to shepherd the game and make it much faster to teach and learn).
Two observations came up during co-op play:
1) Even though this is a puzzle (which tends to attract the Alpha Player more), because we have God Powers (i.e., assymetric powers: Charles had Asklepios, see above, and he was pivotal!), it’s harder to Alpha the other players because all the God Powers are very different. It’s not impossible, but it does make it harder to keep track if each player is cycling through God Powers fairly quickly.
2) You can solve the game without burning your brain(s). In a convention environment, you just want to have fun and play. If you “ignore” the silver goals and just concentrate on “winning” a game, you can just do the gold goals, and the game isn’t too hard. It becomes a lot harder if you want to do ALL the silver goals! You can adjust the level of difficulty of the game as you are playing! You can choose to just go for the win, OR you can choose to get as many objectives as you want! The former is a more “light-and-fun” mode, whereas the latter is a more “brain-burny” mode.
So yes, because this is more of a puzzle, it could have easily turned into an Alpha Player experience. But, between diverting the Alpha Player with a frank discussion, and having the asymmetric God Powers, the Alpha Player Problem wasn’t a problem.
The puzzle was fun cooperatively.
Curse and Blessing
One of things that blew me away was how easily I was able to learn the game as I wen by reading the little blurbs on the board: see above as a Riddle 3 game introduces “Blessings” and “Friendly Gods” to the base game. I mean, this was absolutely a fantastic way to learn the rules. New rules are explained AS THEY COME out, and it makes sense.
… until I turned the page and started working on the next puzzle. “Wait, what were the rules for Blessings again?” Once I had set-up the next puzzle, I couldn’t go back and re-read that rule. Frustratingly, the rulebook sometimes didn’t have this same text. How do I look up that rule again? I did go to BoardGameGeek a few times, and I did Google some things.
This way of learning is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it’s so easy to jump right in, and the rules are on the page themselves! It’s a curse because you can’t go back and re-read those rules once you’ve set-up the next puzzle.
The rulebook probably should have replicated the on-page instructions from the Adventure book in the rulebook (or somewhere). The same text I used the learn the rule would help me solidify the rules in my head. If you feel like you CAN’T go back, it’s frustrating. Imagine in a classroom:
“Teacher, could you explain the Blessings rule again? I didn’t quite get it.”
“No, that’s on a blackboard in another classroom.”
I found the rulebook, especially for the Riddle of the Sphinx to not be great at helping me find rules and disambiguations. See next section for another example!
Occupied/Unoccupied
One rule that particularly seemed frustrating was the occupied rule. You can’t build a piece on a space that’s occupied. Or move onto a space that’s occupied. In the base game, the only things that can occupy spaces are workers/figures or blocks/domes. Is a coin or a blessing on a space considered occupied? Physically, yes!! That coin or blessing coin is physically occupying the space, so it prevents me from moving there, right? Intellectually, I think the idea is that the coins/blessings are just goal markers, so they are NOT occupying, just notating!!
It wasn’t until 100% clear until Riddle 5, when one of the workers actually started on a space with the Coin (bottom left, blue worker), that coins don’t block you. It’s pretty clear you can move through coins, I think, if you can start on a coin.
The rules for Riddle of the Sphinx, and especially Santorini, are brief and succinct. But I think they omit some clarity. A few more sentences here and there would have helped. This particularly issue seemed vexing, and I felt like I was “cheating” if I moved through/onto a Coin. “It’s physically blocking me … should be it a game blocker too?” I think that it is NOT a blocker but a notation … it could have been clearer.
Things to Watch Out For
Magnetic Clasp Not Secure: The binding holding the Riddle of the Sphinx box closed is a magnetic clasp. It did’t feel very secure; I would recommend a rubber band or something to hold it more secure. See above for my rubber band solution.
Use Bright Marker: When you mark bubbles on the Constellation Tree or the Adventure Map, don’t use a pencil like I did (see above). Use a sharpie or red marker or something that really stands out.
Print out: Rather than sully your Adventure book, just print out a copy of the Adventure Map and Constellation Tree from your printer. See above. Not only do you keep your original books pristine, the copies from your printer will be on paper that you can actually write on (the paper from the original is very slick).
Conclusion
Riddle of the Sphinx is clearly more puzzle than game. There are elements of randomness that make it more gamey (which base gods do you get, do you risk rolling a die, etc), but in general: this a puzzle. You need to know that before going in; you may love the idea of a solo or cooperative puzzle using the base rules of Santorini! You may hear that it’s a puzzle to solve and run screaming. Do what you will.
The solo game worked really well; it’s easy to come back to because the rules are pretty straight forward, and it’s easy to save in campaign mode. You can play as much or as little of the campaign as you want.
The cooperative game can succumb to the Alpha Player problem if you aren’t a little careful; Riddle of the Sphinx is a puzzle after all is said and done, and puzzles tend to bring out that Alpha Player. We suggest having a frank discussion about the Alpha Player problem (it worked for us), or just play with a group you already trust and respect. The rapid cycling of asymmetric God Powers did help alleviate the Alpha Player problem a little.
I would absolutely play Riddle of the Sphinx again as a solo game; it’s like an 8.5 or 9 out of 10 for me. It was really fun, and the components were great. The cooperative game, I would play again, because you can adjust the difficulty as you play. I would, however, be very cautious of the Alpha Player issues before I suggested Riddle of the Sphinx to a group, just because, as a puzzle, it’s too easy to fall into the Alpha Player trap. That trap make it a little harder to get out as a cooperative game, so maybe it’s a 7.5 or 8/10 for a cooperative game. It’s fun, it’s adjustable, but you have to be a little careful.
Good game.
coopgestalt 