When the gods grow bored, they decide to spice up their eternal existence by challenging all takers in an ultimate battle of wits. Of course, these deities are capricious, unfair and incomprehensible at the best of times, so winning is virtually impossible for a mere mortal. Even so, things are bound to get interesting when a former goddess and a genius human boy team up in a bid to win the game to end all games.

In truth, I have a hard time understanding how so many anime can still be screwing up one of the most fundamental laws of stories about characters playing a bunch of random clubhouse games: Absolutely nobody on Earth likes to have the rules of a game laboriously explained to them instead of just getting to play the game themselves. Aunty Donna did a whole skit on the concept! This is why the good anime about dicking around with children's card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh, make sure to spice up the otherwise stilted proceedings with wild visuals, campy storytelling and increasingly ludicrous stakes. To this day, no one knows or cares what the actual rules of Duel Monsters are. Gods' Games We Play doesn't do any of these things, despite featuring a premise that is literally dependent on the involvement of gods and magic. Instead it's nothing but flat shots of two uninteresting characters as they sit in tiny room and play the most "killing time at grandma's house" games imaginable while talking ad nauseum about them.

Yeah, I hope you like characters casually sitting and talking to "themselves" as a way to throw an entire series' worth of lore at you, because that is definitely the way that Gods' Games We Play is operating in its premiere. Forget "Show, Don't Tell", because this episode does not trust its viewers to be able to put the pieces together on their own, with the most egregious example being a section in the middle where Miranda just sits staring at her own computer screen nattering away about the entire deal with gods, apostles and games, laying out how the whole thing works even though she's an administrator of some kind and absolutely knows all of this. There's no one else present in the scene, and thus no conceivable reason for her explanation other than clumsy infodumping for the viewers.

Sadly, the games are no different, although the stakes do look like they may change significantly in future episodes. This one, however, focuses on a variation of the old standby Memory. Fay, our preternaturally gifted and unfortunately named protagonist, is brought to the goddess Leoleshea to alleviate her boredom (and see if he's worthy of helping her, presumably), and then rapidly proves his worth by letting his amazing memorization skills slip. Not interested in cheating Leshea out of a good game, he agrees to her fancy moving variant of Memory, which the show acts like is fully new and not something I've seen in at least four different hidden object games--the cards move, making it harder to remember where they are. But we're still treated to an exhaustive explanation of the way the game works and how awesome at it Fay is, because why trust your audience to use their brains and put shit together themselves when you can beat them over the head with information?

Unfortunately, no amount of lifeless exposition concerning the supposed stakes of these games can make up for the complete lack of life in the story itself, and the presence of some floating playing cards doesn't make the proceedings feel magical, no matter how much the show wants to trick you into thinking otherwise. This is one of those startlingly unremarkable filler shows that seemingly exists to fill a box on some company's production schedule checklist. I'm not convinced that even the people who made it will have any memory of its existence by the time the season is done.

It's just a dull watch, since there's nothing at stake and nothing interesting happening, and all the exposition feels like thin excuses for justifying our heroes playing a series of supernatural games that they'll inevitably conquer by figuring out the trick behind it. That would be fine if these characters had any noteworthy personality to hook us with. Fay likes games and is looking for a mysterious red-haired woman from his past. Leshea likes games and is a dragon goddess who doesn't wear underwear. They both have the same perspective on games and agree with everything the other says for 20 minutes. Yippee. If you're really into this particular kind of story, you could certainly do worse (like last year's Liar Liar), but there's also far better versions with more interesting characters.