review
Where mortal dice cooperate
Teotihuacan
City of gods
Essen 2018 – as every year, a lot of new games are published. To stand out from the masses is not that easy. A game that managed to do this quite well in 2018 and one that was very high up on my a-have-to-take-a-closer-look list is Teotihuacan – City of Gods.
Published originally by the Rumanian publisher NSKN Legendary Games and localized in German by Schwerkraft-Verlag, this game by the Italian/Hungarian designer team Daniele Tascini and Dávid Turczi is a good example for the nowadays very frequent international cooperation in the board game community.
The name of the game comes from the Mexican city of ruins, Teotihuacan, that has been over many centuries the center of one of the most important civilizations in Middle America and about which today, unfortunately, there is not much knowledge. The game board shows, prominently, a pyramid that is constructed by players during the game. Surrounding the pyramid, you find some temple tracks and action cases. As to topic, the game is strongly reminiscent of Tzolk’in, especially as one of the designers, Daniele Tascini, has also been one of the designers of Tzolk’in. At this point, at the latest, my interest was pricked, as Tzolk’in is one of my all-time favorite games.
Up to four players can sit around the table to contribute to the construction of Teotihuacan. Whoever acquires most fame while doing this will win. The game comprises up to three eras with a scoring of the end of each era, called an Eclipse. The game also ends immediately when the pyramid is completed. This end is absolutely feasible and can result in the loss of one complete scoring!
Around the pyramid, eight action cases are depicted. Each player begins with three workers, who are represented by dice, and are placed on three different action cases.
Beginning with the starting player, every player has one move in turn, until the game is finished.
A move/turn always begins with moving a worker. To do so,, you select a die and move it in clockwise direction up to three action cases. At the target case you have two or three option from which you must select one:
To select a main action for implementation you must pay with cocoa – one unit of cocoa for each dice color already on the case. So, an action can, in a game of four players, cost you from 0 units of cocoa, if you are first on that case, to four units, if all player colors are already on the case. If you cannot pay the cost, you cannot select the main action. The main action is also related to the action case – you can collect building resources, develop technologies, construct parts of the pyramid or build houses. The power of the action is usually related to the number and strength of your own workers. So, it makes sense to plan actions across several turns. After the main action, usually one or two of the workers are strengthened by raising the dice value by 1. When the value of a die arrives at 6, the worker rises, or dies, that is. The owner of the worker receives a nice bonus, turns the die back to 1 and puts it on the #1 action case.
Harvesting cocoa is the only action that you can do at any time. The strength of the action is, however, dependent on the dice colors already present on the action case. You harvest the number of colors + 1 cocoa units.
Worship is not possible on each of the action cases, but only on cases where corresponding areas are marked. Worshipping gives you advancement on one of the temple tracks and/or development tiles, which can have any kind of imaginable once-only effects. Worship cases offer only one space for the action. If another player die is already there, it must be bought off for the cost of one unit of cocoa. You need not, however, pay cocoa for workers present on the non-worship space in the action case. Dice that are positioned on worship spaces do not count towards the main action or the harvest action and must be bought off before you can use them again. This either costs three units of cocoa, one complete turn or you are lucky and there is another player who buys off his dice to use the case himself.
As we are used to from games of that kind, many of the actions described above yield victory points, directly or indirectly. Whoever has collected most of them at the end of the game, wins the game. There are many different ways to acquire those victory points.
All the same, the tactical component of the game dominates. Who has how many workers at what time on an action case, leads to significant difference in costs for actions, or vice versa, in the harvesting of cocoa. The building parts for pyramid, too, have very different values so that is interesting again and again to insert a building turn when a valuable part appears. On top of that, the game can end surprisingly fast, when enough players force the construction of the pyramid which renders other long-term strategies obsolete.
The mechanism of moving workers with the goal of optimizing the combination of their pip value and number – a complex variant of the Rondel mechanism, has not come to my attention in this form and is therefore refreshingly new and challenging in the first few games. Unfortunately, all the games that I have played so far, have peaked in a very quick construction of the pyramid. Therefore, other strategies were of not much use, which for me deducted a lot of game’s allure in the long run. Furthermore, in my opinion, the rather substantial chance element in the turning up of new pyramid construction parts is not suitable for that kind of game.
All in all, the game does not reach, even in a rudimentary way, the level of the exceptional Tzolk’in, a comparison that probably is a bit unfair but suggests itself.
What remains is a very well designed game with an interesting mechanism and an unpronounceable name, that – as regards to a long-time allure to play – remains on an average level.
Markus Wawra
Players: 1-4
Age: 14+
Time: 120+
Designer: Daniele Tascini, Dávid Turczi
Artist: Odysseas Stamoglou
Price: ca. 50 Euro
Publisher: NSKN Games 2018
Web: www.boardanddice.com
Genre: Rondel, worker placement
Users: For experts
Special: 1 player
Version: en
Rules: cn de en es fr it jp kr nl pl ru
In-game text: no
Comments:
Interesting mechanism
Good components
Allure of the game palls quickly
Compares to:
Tzolk’in, Hamburgum, Praetor
Other editions:
Crowd Games (ru), Game Harbour (cn), Giochix (it) Jumping Turtle (nl), Maldito (es), Pixie Games (fr), Portal Games (pl), Ten Day Games (jp), sternenschimmermeer (kr)
My rating: 4
Markus Wawra:
I am a fan of Tzolk’in and was very curious about Teotihuacan. The fantastic mechanism had me enthralled at the beginning, but after a few games the allure to play was quickly gone.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 1
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 2
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0