It’s so difficult to find a balanced view on CW/GW for this reason. So many opinions online seem to be anchored in the desire for the individual to justify they made the right choice. Inevitable when so much money is spent.
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I think it’s gonna depend a lot on your table. We have done very little negotiation. There’s basically two elements that arguably introduce it:
- certain factions have gifts or other mechanics that require them to give things to other players. This generally means you’ll want to use them to get some benefit from them in return. I think it’s mostly only a couple, though, and you’re not allies or routinely making treaties or anything.
- 2/3rds of the way through the game, there’s a phase called the Great Compromise, where players can choose to give up some of their energy in order to decide how to allocate the Compromise, and then that player allocates a descending amount of VP to each player as they see fit, into negatives in a large enough game. You could negotiate, I guess? Usually we’ve just had that player give themself the most, the furthest behind player the next most, etc.
If it’s any help, I played Cthulhu Wars before I’d ever heard of Gods’ War, and it was partly why I decided to buy into Gods’ War, as it was both more reasonably priced (for certain values of reasonable) and more appealing.
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Have you considered Rising Sun? It’s a while since I played it, but I remember enjoying it more than Blood Rage. It does take quite a while longer though.
I think Battle for Rokugan is a good choice. There’s quite a bit of tactical bluffing, but other than that it’s all battles, all the time 
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If it helps, here is a collaboration from Lindybeige and Matt Lees about Glorantha: Gods’ Wars and its expansions
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Aka Lindybeige passionately rambling about how off the wall crazy the game is, while Matt nods along, gently prodding him into some kind of structure.
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I can’t speak to most of the other games listed here, but I rather like Blood Rage - It’s a 9/10 for me. I bought second hand from a friend who backed it on kickstarter and haven’t been disappointed! (apart from the depiction of the yellow all-female faction - which is very disappointing 
)
It’s quite silly and oozes the ‘heavy-metal vikings’ theme. It’s true that a significant portion of the game is card drafting and that the tactical and strategic ‘combat’ decisions are mostly an outcome of how the draft goes. But I wouldn’t say it plays itself - there’s still tension of where to fight, who to fight and what to do with your limited resources. The drafting is really key to doing well though - so I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t tend to like drafting games.
The Inis comparison is an interesting one - because they are both direct conflict games built around a draft. I didn’t like Inis as much as Blood Rage in the end (in fact I said goodbye to my copy of Inis after 6 months or so). Now if I were to try and unpack the why:
Inis is a very tight game and the draft almost completely determines how the round will go (minus the unknown of the Epic Tale cards). On the other hand Blood Rage feels looser - the draft matters, but it feels like you are making more decisions about when and how to use your cards during the round - bit more tactical thinking involved. I also prefer the fights in Blood Rage which are very ‘all-or-nothing’ most of the time - they feel weightier than the fights in Inis and thus tenser and more exciting, but also easier to recover from than a bad fight in Inis. I’m also a much bigger fan of the escalating ages and regular old VP scoring over the wacky endgame of Inis. Though I may be more in the minority on that one!
£50 (which is like $91 AUD) seems an okay price (without knowing how games are normally priced in the UK…) I paid $140 AUD for my copy but that had the Kickstarter extras (nice, but mostly not a big deal) as well as some expansions - the Mystics (which are great and I always use), the Wildboar clan (which is really just another clan, easy to ignore unless you love painting minis - it doesn’t even let you play with 5!) and the Gods expansion (which I’d really only recommend if you expect to play the game very frequently)
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I can’t speak to Blood Rage directly, since I’ve only had 2nd-hand experience with it.
I have played Rising Sun, and it’s pretty good. Eric Lang (same designer as Blood Rage and Chaos in the Old World) really builds solid area-control wargames. Rising Sun was a little too abstracted for my personal tastes, but it is good if you want a tight auction game that also has some combat. I do wish the combat was re-jigged a little… but the game is less objectifying than Blood Rage, and it is an interesting puzzle.
Another vote in favour of Battle for Rokugan as a really good area-control wargame (hereafter ACWG). It’s like a faster, more blood-thirsty Game of Thrones 2nd Ed, which is a good thing (as much as I love the big ridiculous Game of Thrones game, it has balance and length issues that Rokugan does not). I do wish it were a little more asymmetric, but it is very tight and well designed.
If you can find a copy of Forbidden Stars, that’s my favourite ACWG for many reasons. I usually describe it as a knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth, and it is so good at that. I have once had a player eliminated, but it’s rare since the game in no way rewards you for pursuing that tract (and in this case all 3 of the other players were actively telling the one eliminated player not to do certain actions which he ignored and got him eliminated… sooo…). Sadly out of print, but in my opinion probably the best ACWG.
Cry Havoc has the advantage of still being available (sometimes), and is a pretty close analog to Forbidden Stars. The combat is fantastic, low randomness affair that is really evocative and always feels controllable (which isn’t the same as winnable, obviously). Plus no player elimination, asymmetric factions, and no rewards for turtling. A really solid game, if unfortunately named and with generic theming.
If you are looking for something a bit more bloodthirsty than Inis (which I love, by the by), I might recommend Cyclades. The addition of dice into the combat make it a bit more swingy, but the conflicts tend to be faster and more aggressive than Inis due to a lack of diplomacy. Usually I would argue that’s a weakness, but for a good ACWG to just get you out of the gate swinging… it’s pretty satisfying.
Other than that, I have to mention Dune (get the new one if you can, or the equally-good-but-slightly-different Rex). Factions are balance-through-perfect-imbalance, which means you need 4-6 players to have a reasonably well balanced game, but it is a fascinating political-war simulator. A don’t like Cosmic Encounter, the next game the Dune team designed, but if you want a tighter, more controllable game that’s kinda like Cosmic, then this one is a solid recommendation. Plus, the Bene Gesserit are a riot to play.
Last one is Heroes of Air, Land, and Sea. Basically Warcraft 2 The Board Game (“Join the army they said. See the world they said! I’d rather be sailing.”), it is a neat little 4X game with a pretty heavy emphasis on fights (you get more points for fighting-and-losing than you do for not getting into fights at all, which is nice). It’s not great, and it’s got way, way more pieces and a higher pricepoint than it really deserves, but there is a lot there. I am sad you can theoretically have a player eliminated (they make it implausible, but not impossible, and I usually like ACWGs in which it is actually impossible to be completely eliminated meaningfully from a chance to win).
There are others I could recommend (Space Empires 4X, Empires of the Void II, Shogun, etc…), but they tend to be more specialized than just general-purpose ACWGs.
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Wow!
Thanks
I’m keen on Battle for Rokugan. Cry Havoc seems to be in good stock at a good price in the UK. Buying both leaves considerable change when compared to Glorantha or Cthulu Wars. Or not too much more expensive than Blood Rage.
Forbidden Stars is nowhere to be seen.
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So say we all…
It was part of the (relatively) short-lived collaboration between FFG and Games Workshop, and one of the better games that came from that particular pairing. It is a grail game for many (myself included until the generousity of a SUSD forumite helped get that game into my hands… where it will remain until it is literally buried with me hundreds of years from now).
You can still find them occasionally, and if you can get a copy for about $100CAD it’s definitely worth it. I might go as high as $150CAD, maybe $200CAD if you’ve played it and love it as much as I do. But yeah, it’s getting harder and harder to find.
Good news, though! GW has teamed up with Wizkids now, and they’ve reprinted a few of the old GW-FFG games that were out of print for a long time (Fury of Dracula being one, I believe?), so maybe there’s hope yet!
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The Bene Gesserit win condition is one of my favourite things in all of boardgaming 
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They were trying for an established IP, but it was dragging on. Really curious which IP they were gunning for now.
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Who was the maker of that Rex? Is it the Rex: Final Days of an Empire?
I have to agree, Dune was a riot to play, and that is only after having played an unfinished game of 3 and half hours. It is definitely one that eventually I will get in my collection, if only due to my loving of the book series.
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I’ll certainly be interested to see what’s come up with, but once you change the theme and the mechanics I think it’s tough to say that it’ll be Forbidden Stars in any meaningful sense. Fortunately, I bought Forbidden Stars before the FFG/GW deal fell apart.
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That’s the one. Mechanically, it’s 95% Dune with a few rules tightened up, a few of the sillier bits taken out (Duelling Grounds, anyone?) and much, much better components.
The theme is changed and it’s not a perfect analog (the Xxcha as Bene Gesserit doesn’t really make sense, but the rest of it is pretty good if you are familiar with the Twilight Imperium universe), and I love the fleet but it isn’t quite as clear how it moves around the board compared to the sandstorm, but honestly, I think it’s a very, very good Dune-clone.
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From what I can see from reviews of Glorantha: Gods’ War and Cthulu Wars, they seem very over the top, and quite niche. If you are a fan of the series and want to splash money on them, they can be for you, but that is quite some money that I think I would definitely put on other games first because: a) they will hit the table more often, b) they are not ridiculously long and c) there are other games that are way cheaper and can achieve similar levels of joy for me.
Saying that, if money and space were no object, I think I would get both for the fun of it. But sadly, that’s not the case.
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I disagree. CW is midlength, running for 2 hrs on average like any medium weight area controls.
And I certainly played my copy waaay more than most TI4 owners get to play their dusting copies of TI4, which is at the same price range.
Speaking of “number of plays:price” ratio. I get to play the dead simple Big City Jumbo way more than people get to play their big epic games.
Neither game is all that long by boardgame standards. I think you could probably knock out a four player Gods’ War in maybe a couple hours if everyone were experienced and decisive, and Cthulhu Wars is a bit shorter than that.
But yes, they’re very difficult to widely recommend because they are enormous and enormously expensive, and they’re not really doing anything totally original. Which is pretty much what I would say about all of Sandy Petersen Games’ output, except maybe Evil High Priest, which isn’t enormous or expensive, and is doing some interesting things with worker placement that…well, okay, they’re still kind of comparable to Dungeon Lords. But they’re relatively rare. And I’m going to have four of those games once Hyperspace ships.
Still. They’re good, also.
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I don’t deny their quality. They are definitely games that I’d love to have and play often. But one has to be realistic about these things, I am pretty sure unless I get 3 or 4 other fans (like with TI 4, by the way) to meet often, they will hardly hit the table in my circumstances.
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As with all things, “it depends”. Sometimes these things work out, other times they become a shadow of their former selves. I’m curious how they change things up considering many think FS itself is an adaptation of StarCraft.
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