The Acts is a worker placement game that takes you on a competitive journey through the spread of the early church told through the Books of Acts. As someone who enjoys the worker placement games, I found that this one to be a refreshing change for the genre. Most worker placement games start with your workers in a pool. In Acts, all the disciples start on the board at the same time – gathered together in Judea. From there, their journey starts with traveling around the board into other regions and taking various actions: building churches, performing miracles, praying, and writing to the churches they built. All to save as many souls so they can. So far, so ‘Book of Acts.’ But this isn’t a cooperative game where each of the disciples is working towards the greater good. In this game, souls are your points towards winning this competitive game.
The game starts with twelve disciples in Judea divided up equally amongst the number of players. As one might expect with a worker placement game – these disciples are used to perform a variety of actions. Players can move their disciples to different regions in Judea, Cilicia, Galatia, and Achea. They can obtain prayer points, the currency in Acts, or spend two of those points to gain a spiritual gift card for a long-term benefit to their disciples. They can choose to disciple others, gaining more workers and getting more action options per turn. There are a number of action options that are used to save souls – the ultimate goal of the game – such as preaching, building churches, or writing to those churches you’ve placed in previous rounds. Each of those actions
There are a number of interesting ways to combo and expand on the points related actions. These combos reflect the nature of the actual disciples work in regards to spreading the gospel and the early church. Building churches is a lot easier in the Acts then it probably was during the building of the early church, and there’s certainly less threat of being stoned and imprisoned. Building churches will save two souls and give you a bonus to all prayer and preach actions in the region. Just like when Paul would write letters to churches offering guidance and encouragement, players can write to their churches in order to either save a soul or receive one prayer point, plus then you save souls equal to the number of churches you have, encouraging you to plant more churches and increase your effectiveness.
The Acts is a good game, but there were problems. We had a problem of running out of spaces in the first round. The directions weren’t clear on the availability and function of getting the prayer points you need to expand. The rulebook doesn’t clearly state that multiple people can use the prayer space at a time. You have to go to a box with small print on the quick reference page to find that rule. This lead to everyone using their prayer points to build churches and buy spiritual gifts to the point that they ran out and couldn’t do any other actions. This wasn’t the only bit of rules confusion, but we were also playing with a prototype copy of the game – so this issue may be addressed before the game’s official release.
The player really feels like they are going out and spreading the gospel. This is great in terms of implementation but has raised a question for some people. How would the competitive nature of the gameplay affect what is essentially a game about the spreading the gospel in the early church? In the early church, there were differing opinions on who was worthy to hear the good news about Jesus (Acts 11, 1-3; Acts 15). It leads to intense differences of opinion and methodology, especially between Peter and Paul. So when you’re talking about the
At the time this is being posted, the Kickstarter for The Acts has twelve days left. The game has funded, so give it a look and see if you might want to help them reach some of their goals.