Wouter & Ymke 
There are two of you trying to become High Ruler of Ireland. Unfortunately, there are also three Fomorian clans spreading across the country, and they don’t seem particularly interested in either of you winning. That’s the basic situation in Moytura, a two-player area-majority game where the enemies on the board aren’t controlled by either player.
On paper, your job seems simple enough. Spread your followers, gain control of regions and deal with whatever gets in your way. Except we soon discovered that dealing with the Fomorians isn’t always a good idea. Sometimes they’re occupying exactly the region you need. Sometimes they’re about to ruin everything. And sometimes they’re sitting next to your opponent and, well… maybe they’re fine there for another round.
👥 2 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designers: Trevor Benjamin & David Thompson
🎨 Artwork: A. Giroux & Harry Conway
🏢 Publisher: Bitewing Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Moytura is played over ten rounds, split into two eras of five rounds each. Every round has three turns: one for each player, followed by an enemy turn. At the end of rounds five and ten, Ireland is scored region by region. The two players and the combined enemy faction compete for first and second place in each region, with both positions worth points.
On your turn, you choose either one of four deity tiles or the Tuatha Dé Danann card from the display. The bottom deity is free, while choosing one higher up costs worship tokens depending on how many tiles you skip. Taking a deity from one of the top two positions can also upgrade it for you. Once you’ve finished your turn, the display changes, so the deity you just used won’t necessarily be as easy to reach next time.
Whichever deity you choose determines how you can expand. You select a space containing one or more of your followers as an origin, but those followers don’t move. Instead, you place new followers from your supply into another space. The deity’s position in the display determines how many followers you get, with previous upgrades potentially adding more. A deity action can place between two and six followers. The Tuatha Dé Danann card works differently: you expand one space with a single follower and gain a worship token.
The four deities each handle expansion differently. Ériu lets you reach a target up to two spaces away. Boand can reach as far as five spaces, provided the origin, target and spaces in between all border the same body of water. Morrígan only expands to an adjacent space, but afterwards can defeat up to two nearby enemy units. Dagda lets you expand twice, splitting your new followers between two targets, and those expansions can even begin from different origins.
You can’t expand into a space containing your opponent’s followers, but you can enter one occupied by enemies. When that happens, followers and enemies remove each other one-for-one until one side is gone. Enemies defeated during your own turn are kept, and every three can be exchanged for one worship token. You can also collect worship from mound spaces or by using the Tuatha Dé Danann card. That worship is then available when you want to reach a deity sitting higher in the display.
Once both players have taken their turns, the enemies act. A card shows which Fomorian clan activates and whether it adds one or two units when expanding. You identify that clan’s largest connected group of spaces, then it spreads into eligible adjacent spaces connected to that group by paths. If the new enemies enter spaces with player followers, conflict happens there as well. The three clans move separately during the game, but when scoring they’re treated as one faction.
After rounds five and ten, each region is scored according to how many units the white player, black player and enemies have there. First and second place receive the printed points, with ties splitting the relevant values. A player with an outright majority in a region containing an enemy stronghold also scores two extra points. After the second scoring, the faction with the most points wins. The enemies can win the game themselves, and if they’re involved in a tie, they win that too. They’re not exactly gracious guests.
Artwork & Components
Moytura is pretty colourful once everything is on the table. Ireland is divided into regions using greens, reds, purples and earthy colours, surrounded by a dark blue sea. There are Celtic-inspired patterns worked into the board as well, although most of the information you actually need, such as paths, borders and region values, remains easy enough to find.
I particularly like the look of the deity tiles. Ériu, Boand, Morrígan and Dagda each have large illustrations rather than being reduced to small cards full of icons. The Fomorians go in a different direction, with dark figures and glowing eyes against much brighter backgrounds. The box continues that darker side of the artwork, with a large shadowy figure looming over the scene below.
The units are thick circular tokens, and once several occupy the same space they create some fairly substantial stacks. That helps when looking across the board because you can quickly spot where things are getting crowded. The wooden strongholds also stand above everything around them, so they’re difficult to miss. The deity tiles, cards and other cardboard components all feel substantial enough for the amount of handling they get.
The board does become busy later in the game. There can be player stacks, three colours of enemies, strongholds and all the markings on the map competing for your attention. We didn’t have much trouble reading the actual game state, but visually there’s definitely plenty going on.
Our Experience
Our first mistake was assuming that more followers generally meant we were doing better. The board invites you to spread out, and putting a large stack into a region feels productive. So that’s what we did. Then scoring got closer and we realised we’d sometimes placed four or five followers somewhere that was already safely ours, while another region needed only one or two to change the scoring completely. That was when Moytura started making more sense to us. We became less interested in having the biggest presence on the map and more interested in doing just enough in the places that mattered.
That changed again once we’d played a few more times. We stopped asking, “Who controls this region now?” and started asking what it might look like when scoring actually happened. Being behind with three rounds still to go wasn’t necessarily a problem, and immediately answering every move from the other player could leave us short of followers or worship later. We also became more comfortable simply giving something up. One of us would point at a region and say, “You’re going to lose that.” The answer was occasionally just, “Yes.” And that was fine. Giving up first place there might leave enough resources to improve our position in two other regions instead.
The deity display became a much bigger part of our turns than we’d expected. In our first game, we mostly looked at which deity could get us where we wanted to go. Later, we paid much more attention to where that deity was sitting in the display, how much worship it would cost and whether taking it would give us an upgrade for later. Sometimes we paid three worship because that particular expansion mattered right now. At other times, we’d change the whole plan because a cheaper deity could accomplish almost the same thing. Sometimes the expensive deity wasn’t even that useful right away, but taking it meant a better upgrade for later. After our first couple of games, worship became something we were much more reluctant to spend without a good reason.
We made a similar mistake with the Fomorians. Initially, enemy tokens appeared and our reaction was to remove them. I mean, they’re called enemies. The game isn’t exactly being subtle about this. Then one of us cleared a group and realised we’d also removed the only thing keeping the other player out of a scoring position. From that point onwards, we stopped automatically treating every Fomorian as something that needed to disappear. Sometimes both of us could see that a group was becoming a problem, but neither wanted to spend the turn dealing with it. There was always an excellent argument for why the other person should clean up the mess. Occasionally we both waited too long and the Fomorians simply scored the region themselves, which was probably the fairest possible outcome.
The map itself also looked different after a few games. A single follower in an unimportant region initially felt like a weak presence. Later, that same follower might be exactly what we wanted because it gave us another place to expand from. We started placing followers not only for the influence they provided now, but for where they might let us reach several turns later. Boand made positions around water particularly useful, while Dagda could suddenly connect plans on two completely different parts of the map. Early placement mattered, but we never felt that one early choice committed us to a particular strategy. Mostly, it gave us more places to work from once the board became crowded.
Our Thoughts
The rules of Moytura didn’t take us particularly long to learn. What took longer was judging whether a region actually needed another follower, whether three worship was worth spending on a deity and whether that group of Fomorians was really our problem. The deity display is particularly good at making an obvious turn slightly less obvious. The deity you want may be expensive, while something cheaper can sometimes achieve almost the same result and leave your worship available for later.
The Fomorians also stop every region from becoming a simple contest between the two players. You can’t simply enter your opponent’s spaces and remove their followers, so most of the interference comes from changing the numbers around them. For us, that was enough interaction without needing direct combat. If you mainly enjoy area-control games because you want to march into somebody else’s territory and destroy their pieces, Moytura may feel restrained. Here you’re more often trying to make their position less valuable than trying to remove it completely.
There is a cost to having the Fomorians involved. Their activations introduce uncertainty, particularly near scoring. You can see which groups are dangerous and get an idea of where they could spread, but you don’t control which clan activates next. An inconvenient card can therefore change a region that looked reasonably safe. Sometimes we liked having that uncertainty because otherwise the final rounds could become fairly easy to calculate. Other times, honestly, the Fomorians just turned up in exactly the wrong place and it was annoying. Players who prefer every change on the board to come directly from one of the two players may have a harder time accepting that.
I’m also curious about the longer-term variety. The standard Fomorians are deliberately straightforward, and after several games we were already getting better at predicting which groups were likely to cause problems. The alternative enemy clans should help with that because they don’t all spread in the same way as the standard Fomorians. The rulebook recommends introducing them gradually, starting with one special clan alongside two standard Fomorian clans before potentially using more, and that feels right to us. I wouldn’t immediately replace everything. The standard setup is easier to read, and I’d rather understand what the normal enemies are doing before adding several different behaviours.
The deities are the other part I’m not ready to make a final judgement on. Their value changes so much with geography, upgrades and the current scoring situation that comparing them directly isn’t particularly useful. Dagda’s split expansion gave us some very efficient turns, Morrígan can combine expansion with removing enemies, and Boand can suddenly reach somewhere that seemed completely out of the way. We definitely had moments where one deity looked much better than the others, but it wasn’t always the same deity from game to game. More plays might reveal patterns we haven’t seen yet, so deity balance is something I’d rather leave as an open question than pretend we’ve solved.
Despite those reservations, Moytura is one we’d happily play again. I think it suits regular two-player opponents who enjoy area majority but don’t necessarily need direct combat. You do have to be comfortable with an automated faction interfering with your plans, and occasionally with an enemy card changing something you thought was settled. Players looking for aggressive head-to-head conflict or complete control over the board state may find that frustrating.
Afterwards, we were still talking about the region we’d spent far too many followers on, the Fomorian we really shouldn’t have killed, or the single follower that ended up giving us access to exactly where we needed to be. Our first games were mostly about putting followers onto the map. Later games became more about deciding where we could get away with not putting them, when worship was actually worth spending and which apparent problems could safely remain somebody else’s problem. We still made mistakes, but they were increasingly our mistakes rather than mistakes caused by not understanding the game. And I suspect there are still situations on that map where we’re going to confidently decide we’ve worked everything out, only for the Fomorians to remind us that we haven’t.
📝 We received a copy of Moytura from Bitewing Games.
