Enthrone Review:
A Wonderful Duel of Deception

Let me get right to it: Enthrone is a phenomenal two player board game. It’s a duel of wits, filled with moves, countermoves, and bluffing that can make you feel like the most skilled chess player you know. At the same time, this is a board game that is a bit of a contradiction in many ways. It’s an abstract game, but comes with beautifully crafted figurines. Enthrone gives you as a player worlds of information to play with… except for that one piece of knowledge that you really need to feel sure of what you are doing. It plays fast, but feels designed to cause analysis paralysis.

Again, I’ll say immediately that Enthrone is a wonderful board game, and that if you’ve ever liked any two player board game from Warhammer to Chess, this is a game that has something for you. The real question that this review is going to try and answer isn’t if Enthrone is a good game, but instead if it is a game that is right for you and your friends.

What is Enthrone?

Enthrone is a 2 player abstract game where you both are vying for power over the throne. How exactly? It’s not clear, as the rules and theme don’t always mix, but my goodness are the game components evocative. Marble statues of jesters and knights and maidens and demons all trying to eliminate each other or get to the center of the table, the different board tiles arranged to look like stained glass… regardless of the actual goal, you and your opponent both feel like you are power players for a medieval throne, and that’s what matters.

How to play is simple to explain, but complexity increases as you realize how all the parts interact. There are eight different figurines that are arranged in starting positions around the board, with eight matching tiles placed along an action board. On your turn, all you do is take a tile from the action board, move the same corresponding figure one square, and then put that tile on the bottom of the action stack! Bottom three tiles can’t be used. Easy.

First complication: at the start of the game, you and your opponent get three cards, each showing a different figurine. You choose one each in secret to be the figurine that represents you. It means that of the 8 figurines on the board, you know one of them is you, and you know the other two are not a threat. Which means your foe can be any of the remaining 5.

Second complication: let’s look at the victory conditions!

1. If your chosen figurine gets to center tile, you win the game! Congratulations!
2. If the enemy figurine gets removed from the board by being captured, you win!
3. Each figurine wants to remove three other figurines from the board. If you get your three ‘quarry’, you also win!

Yes, this means that by moving a statue into another one, you ‘capture’ it, and remove it from the board. There aren’t a lot of spaces on this board as you can see, so that means lots of statues are close to each other. Don’t worry, this is where the third complication kicks in: look at the action board. The bottom three tiles can’t be moved, while you can only move to the center space if the statue you want to move is in the top three tiles. If you want to attack another model? The matching attacking statue has to be in the top two.

Already you can see how this game escalates quickly. A single turn is just moving one single piece on the board… but there are so many ways that moving just one piece can cause ripple effects both for your plans and your opponent’s. Remember, you can move any piece on the board as long as the action tiles allow for it, including your foe. I’ve seen games where one player smiles at the other and thanks them for moving their piece into the exact right place they needed to then win the game.

The Good: Moves and Countermoves

Ugh, I’m just going to rave for a minute about how much fun this game is for me. Full disclosure, I always liked chess as an idea, but the idea of playing Chess competitively seemed boring. There were books out, decades old strategies that people memorized: it didn’t feel like I was playing the game and being clever myself, just executing a puzzle many others had already solved.

Here, in Enthrone, the magic of Chess is back for me. There’s no dice, no ‘luck’ in that sense, but this wonderful game of wits. Each of you wants to race to the center or eliminate your rival. But because the set up of each game is a little different, because you don’t know exactly what your target is, there is no formulaic equation for a perfect game. Enthrone becomes a game about trying to figure out what your opponent is doing before they do the same to you.

The multiple victory conditions also does an amazing job here making it so the games don’t feel like there’s just one strategy. Let’s say your opponent is playing as the Maiden statue, but spends their first few turns by racing the Knight towards the center of the board. Can you trust that it’s a bluff? Maybe the Knight was one of the three cards you got to see, so you know its a bluff. Maybe you should capture the Knight statue just to remove a possible threat.

This is where we get the fourth complication: the lose condition! Yes, you can eliminate models, but only so many. Once three models have already been removed, the player who eliminates the fourth model is playing with fire. If it isn’t their last quarry target or the opponent’s hidden piece, you lose instead.

Again, it’s all about your one move each turn having more and more possible ramifications. Sure, I could choose to spend my action to kill that knight, but it means one less option later on. Maybe eliminating the Knight means I move a statue into position that was my foe’s quarry… even worse, what if the Knight was one my foe’s quarry, and I just spent the turn doing the dirty work for them? Of course, I could just spend an action to move the knight myself away from the center, but that’s me taking my turn doing busy work instead of forwarding my own goals.

I cannot stress enough how satisfying it feels to win in this game. It feels as though you’ve gotten away with some elaborate bank heist, like a schemer who’s succeeded on tricking everyone to take the prize. The amount of times I’ve seen a game pause for a whole minute to hear players suddenly say “This is intense,” or “This game is really cool”, commenting on how they can’t tell what’s a bluff or what isn’t, how they feel like they are either about to make a genius play or feel like a complete fool, and then react loudly when the consequences are revealed soon after.

Finally, I have to get to the fifth complication, which I think really epitomizes the brilliance of Enthrone’s ability to keep everything tense and engaging. Whenever a model is eliminated, the matching action tile becomes a downward arrow. This means that effectively, you can choose one of those arrow tiles to take the action of the tile beneath it, allowing for statues to effectively be moved twice (or more!) in a row. This can make a very ordered game suddenly feel as though it’s speeding up, as each statue remaining becomes more and more of a threat. One single move can set up a combo that didn’t exist when the game had begun. The intensity never lets up until someone has won.

Sure, Entis abstract, but has an amazing feel and theme. I love the paint wash on the statues to give them that sense of weathered pieces you’d use in some centuries old castle. I enjoy how the game feels to play, and I adore that while the box says a match can take twenty minutes, most games can be ten or less. I’ve gotten a lot of plays of Enthrone in as a warm up with a friend while we wait for others to arrive for bigger games. If you’ve always liked the idea of Chess, there’s a good chance that Enthrone is a game you will want in your collection.

The Drawbacks: A Great Game In A Crowded Space

If you can’t tell already, I’m a huge fan of this game, and don’t think it has a lot of flaws. Instead, I think that Enthrone is a really good game that knows exactly what it is trying to be, and the real question is whether or not it’s a game that’s right for you. There are a lot of two player board games out there, each with their own theme, style, and genre. It can mean that even if you appreciate this one, it might not be one you want to own.

This is an abstract game, and it does feel like a ‘classic’ board game like Chess and Checkers as you move the pieces.. That may appeal to some, and might turn others away. At the same time, I really enjoy how the hidden knowledge of who your target is helps make this a game that feels very replayable. At the same time, I know some players who really detest hidden knowledge in 1v1 games, and might not enjoy this one.

There are two issues I’ll cover quickly that might be dealbreakers or dealmakers for readers: the Price/Size, and the ease of play. First, the price and size of Enthrone: some people really like duel games that are just cards, making them easy to transport and cheap to pick up. Meanwhile, Enthrone has… not a big box, but a modest 11 by 11 inches, which means you can’t just toss it in your bag last minute the same way. It’s also $40, which means it isn’t a quick impulse buy. For me? The price is worth it, as I really enjoy the chonkiness of the figurines and the heft of the tiles, but for some, it might just be more bulky than they like.

If there is one real issue, it might just be how Enthrone really rewards multiple plays. It’s a pretty simple game in terms of rules, but first plays with new players can have games that only last five minutes or less as people have their first ‘aha’ moments in how clever this game can be, losing without realizing how quarry works, or how statues can suddenly start moving much faster. Games will actually get longer as both players learn the tricks and discover strategies, making individual rounds feel more rewarding, but it might leave newer players feeling left in the dust for their first few games.

Long story short, Enthrone is a great game, but it’s about personal appeal. There are many, many great two player games out there, each with their own niche. Some are more economic or engine building (7 Wonders Duel), or grandiose and all about direct conflict (Warhammer, any wargame or skirmish game). Is this game worth buying? Depends if you are looking for a good 2 player duel game or if that itch is already scratched by something else in your collection like War Chest.

Enthrone Is A Great Thinking Game That Doesn’t Outstay It’s Welcome

That being said, I’m very happy I have a copy of Enthrone. When I head to game night, it’s an automatic include in my boardgame bag, often thrown in alongside another 2 player game so people have options based on what mood they are in. Since getting a copy at PAX Unplugged last December, I’ve played it personally about twelve to fifteen times and taught it to two others for about six to eight games. No one has walked away with a bad impression, with the most negative reaction having been “Fun game… not sure it’s for me”.

Enthrone is worth its money by this point, and one friend picked up their own copy after trying it with me. It’s clever, plays very fast, and just gets more intense with repeated plays. I’ve enjoyed learning alongside some of my friends, and then sitting down for rematches and watching as the moves and counter moves pile up. For my group, any game that makes you feel this clever when you manage a win is worth giving a shot, so if you see Enthrone at a convention or in a friend’s collection, give it one or two plays to see if it finds that perfect spot on your shelf for many game nights to come.