In my review of MIDDLE-EARTH QUEST, a game I liked quite a lot for its challenging interpretation of the adventure game genre, I commented that barring a really significant release that it was on track to be the Gameshark Board Game of the Year, the third in a row for Fantasy Flight Games and designer Corey Konieszcka. I hope that Mr. Konieczksa hasn’t cleared off the mantle yet (assuming that his upcoming RUNEWARS isn’t a masterpiece), because a game that I never thought would be a contender has emerged as the best game released in 2009.

Eric Lang’s CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD is a stunning game that bridges Ameritrash and Eurogame design styles in a more refined, intelligent way than anything else that I’ve ever seen. It is a high concept, cutting edge piece of work that gives us both masterful mechanical craft and tremendously thematic fun. It combines the brainy elements of strategy gaming with raw brutality and vicious competition in new ways and it serves as an outstanding example of the kind of game that I, and many others, want to be playing as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

CHAOS IN THE WORLD finds two to four players taking on the roles of the four major Chaos gods of Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe. Similar to the biblical Four Horseman but with more spikes and blood, these gods vie to corrupt the Old World. War between the gods and their servitors is simply a day at the office in this setting, as the forces of these malign deities spread the word of their respective deities across the continent by a variety of means. Each god has three basic unit types: cultists, who add corruption tokens that accumulate to “ruin” territories; warrior units (lesser demons) who do most of the fighting (and dying); and a single badass greater demon unit that has a little extra weight in terms of killing ability.

The game can be won by amassing 50 victory points by controlling and ruining areas or by advancing your respective god’s “threat dial”. The threat dial is an innovative concept that creates short term goals and rewards for accomplishing game objectives and each god has its own unique set of rewards and advancement conditions.

Both key victory conditions give players a lot of room for strategy as well as flexibility, but if players fail to collectively ruin the Old World then everybody loses. The Chaos gods (the players) are effectively beaten back. I love that. The Old World and its people are abstracted, but they are definitely a participant in the game’s events—so much that they’re practically an automated fifth player. Too many games have these “neutral” pieces that have to be beaten but really function as little more than speed bumps or buffers between players. Here, they feel more like part of the game’s narrative. Event cards produce various effects that might forbid combat in certain regions, Skaven may show up, or peasants might interfere with godly proceedings. The game creates a living, breathing world where things happen and players have to react and adjust accordingly. It never feels like you’re just shuffling plastic figures around a map because so much effort was put into the game’s narrative and conceptual basis and matching those up with smartly applied mechanics.

The thematic concepts alone are worth a million bucks- there’s no grain harvesting, bartering for sacks of cinnamon, or building plazas here. Don’t expect to come into CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD for a polite evening of gentlemanly boardgaming. This is, after all, a game that features a miniature of a demon licking blood off an axe. I particularly love that it’s for once not a game about taking over the world- it’s all about ruining it. Oh, and the illustration of the map is on a stretched-out piece of human flesh so if there’s any doubt that the game is a nasty, bloodthirsty one that values soul-wrenching awesomeness over tea-and-crumpets elegance I’d like to present the board as exhibit 1. It’s WARHAMMER, through and through, but on a different scale and from a different angle than we’re used to seeing. I daresay that Mr. Lang has crafted something that really expands the possibilities of the WARHAMMER setting, and the decision to put the players in the roles of the Chaos gods is absolutely inspired and rather unexpected.

Each of the gods has an entirely unique suite of special abilities, units, upgrades, and action cards. All four gods play differently in much the same way that each faction in the classic DUNE offers different goals, agendas, and ways to play. So Nurgle, the Plague god, is set up to spread corruption in populated areas through disease and he gets access to delightful cards such as “Rain of Pus”. Khorne, the Blood God, is all about war and combat so a player taking up his bloody axe should spend most of the game chopping other cultists and warriors to pieces. Each is superbly balanced against the others, and watching how abilities and goals play off of each other during the course of the game is quite awesome. The game plays great with two or three, but with four you really get to see all of this working together in full swing.

If it isn’t already apparent, CHAOS is a very, very thematic game that fires on both executive and conceptual thematic cylinders. Flavor text and artwork abound, but more significantly the game leverages what is really a combination of two tried-and-true board game genres to arrive at a rock-solid synthesis of fairly divergent play styles. It isn’t hard to see how the game, with its impetus for territorial control and thrilling dice-based combat is very indebted to the RISK family of “dudes on a map” games. But there are some terrific new concepts that elevate the game above the hordes of second-rate subgenre contenders. One mechanic that I’m particularly fond of is where each territory has two slots for players to cast spells that provide an overall effect in the region that could swing combat or corruption in their favor. Another is the fairly limited unit supplies, which makes it necessary to carefully budget forces and adjust according to tactical situations. And it’s really amazing how a simple mechanic where a roll of six “explodes”, offering you another free die roll can be so dramatic and exciting.

With its corruption mechanics that find players counting up tokens and figures in map areas for scoring and other purposes, it’s also in line with the area control genre common among Eurogames such as EL GRANDE or WALLENSTEIN. It’s actually one of the more complicated and tricky area control games I’ve ever played barring something like DIE MACHER, but here again the game manages to rise above the boring, routine mechanics of so many games of this style. Regions can be jam packed with figures from two, three, and even four sides. Battles might reduce numbers, but the contest to add corruption points and reach the critical breaking point where a territory is ruined creates a tension and close competition that’s much more exciting than simply counting up cubes to see who has the most.

CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD demonstrates that a game doesn’t have to be some kind of out-of-the-blue, divinely (or devilishly) inspired game with utopian originality to be great. It is a very, very studied design that tells us that Mr. Lang is as much a student of modern game design as he is an excellent interpreter of what works and what does not when synthesizing inspiration. It’s also not hard to see where his experience as Fantasy Flight’s top collectible card game designer leaks into this design with its card combinations and the basic concept of paying resource points to summon materiel into play. Yet, the game transcends many of its forbearers because it does everything incredibly well, and the sheer craft that Mr. Lang has invested in bridging some fairly disparate design ideas is staggeringly impressive. It is particularly admirable that the design doesn’t shy away from the complexities that some of its more interesting mechanics need in order to function. Make no mistake, CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD is a fairly complicated game- it skews a little rules-heavy all things considered- but the rules weight buys a lot of detail and interesting strategic opportunities.