Renegade Game StudiosGates of Delirium

Gates of Delirium is a fun little, fast game. It's a worker placement, card placement game, where you try to investigate regions of the board to open Gates and unleash Monstrosities, while scoring Victory Points. Very simple to learn and understand. Very easy for non gamers to learn and play!

Gates of Delirium is a welcomed competitive Lovecraftian-themed game in an ocean of cooperatives. Beautiful artwork and fluid mechanics complement its bewitching gameplay. The sane and insane mechanic spices up card play, but the set collecting of map and relic cards feels disjointed. Overall, a solid game missing one thing to make it a great game.

This game is very enjoyable. Multi use cards depending on your sanity. The active player will determine if the actions will be "sane" or "insane" for the duration of the round. However, if you choose to, you may spend desperation tokens to flip to the other type of actions. There are several different types of things you are collecting from map quadrants and lost pages, to runes. You can also construct gates by collecting a certain number of that colored gate and playing them in a pattern (think of the game Lotus). Once a gate is completed, you will then score the corresponding colored region on the board depending on area majority. I knock off 1/2 star for the screwy score track which can be a bit cumbersome, and another 1/2 star because it can be pretty luck driven. If you don't get the card draws you need to finish a map or complete a page sequence, then you can fall behind without a great way to catch-up. I plan to keep it though as I don't really mind the random nature of the card draw. all in all, a pretty fun game.