About Santorini with Gods

Santorini is a building game: two players race to the top of the towers they build together on a little Greek island. What makes it is the gods: each player plays one, and its power bends the rules for them. It was designed by Gordon Hamilton and is published by Roxley. This is an unofficial fan-made version and isn't associated with the real game.

Like it? Go buy the real thing!

The gods here play the way they do on Board Game Arena in its Arena mode, with the same 62 gods, the same draft and the same banned pairs. For the game without gods, play Santorini.

How to Play

The basics: each player has two workers, a female and a male (some gods have more). On your turn, move one of your workers to any of the eight squares around it. It can climb up one level at most, and step down as far as it likes. Then that same worker builds: it adds a level to a square next to where it now stands. A tower goes up three levels, then a dome caps it for good. Nobody can move onto or build on a square with a worker or a dome.

Step up onto a third level and you win. You also win if your opponent can't take a turn.

The gods: each player plays a god, and its power changes the rules for them. It might let you move again, build twice or push other workers around, hold back your opponent, or win another way. The card says exactly how: every card is listed below.

The draft:

1. Six gods are drawn at random.
2. Player 1 picks two of them for the game. Some pairs are banned together, and can't both be picked.
3. If one of the two is Nyx, six gods are drawn to be her Night Power, and player 1 picks one.
4. Player 1 decides which of the two gods moves first. (Bia always does.)
5. Player 2 takes either god, and player 1 plays the other.

So player 1 can't just pick the strongest god, since player 2 would take it. Player 1's job is to pick a pair that's as even as possible, with who moves first as part of the balance.

Setting up: the first mover places their workers, female first, then the other player does. Then the first mover takes the first turn.

Nyx: she has no power of her own. Instead she brings a second god's power, her Night Power, which player 1 picks in the draft. At the end of every turn, the complete towers (three levels and a dome) are counted. With an odd number, Nyx has her Night Power and her opponent has no power. With an even number, as at the start, it's the other way around.

Heroes: ten of the gods are Heroes, and a Hero's power works just once a game.

Nothing is hidden, and after the draft nothing is left to chance: Arena mode leaves out the gods with secrets or luck. This version also never runs out of blocks, which almost never matters.

The AI

It works like DeepMind's AlphaZero. A neural network learned the game by playing itself, with no human games or tips. It started out knowing only the rules and playing at random, and by the time of this network it had played millions of games, in a couple of days on one home graphics card. On its turn, a tree search uses the network to size up its options and plays the best one it found.

One network plays every god. Along with the board, it's told which god each player has and which powers are working right now (Circe can take her opponent's, and Nyx's comes and goes). It learned the draft too: a quarter of its games started with one, and the rest with a random matchup. A turn with gods can be a string of decisions (move, move again, build, use a power or not), and it makes them one at a time.

It all runs in your browser. Expert thinks for 2 seconds at every decision with more than one option, so it's a bit stronger on a faster device. The other levels don't look ahead at all. Strong plays whatever looks best right now, and each level below it picks more at random, down to Random, which plays any legal move. Strong and Expert never miss a win they can take at once. The bar during the game is the computer's estimate of each side's chances.

The Analysis page shows what it makes of any position, the draft included: it scores every god you could pick, so it's the place to ask which gods to choose.

The Gods

Every god in Arena mode, with its card's text from Board Game Arena.