Rondels in disguise

The first thing you’ll notice after you’ve punched out the million (that might be an exaggeration…) cardboard tulip tokens is the funky interlocking gear wheels. Each player has one, and both of the wheels have actions on them. On your turn you rotate the left wheel the required number of spaces (more on that later), which in turn rotates the right wheel. You pick one of the two actions – or sometimes both – now indicated on the board and do that thing.

Now, being the astute lover of rondels that I am, it didn’t escape my attention that what we’re dealing with here are actually two interlocking rondels. The difference between these and something like my beloved Hamburgum (read the review here) is that instead of moving a pawn around a rondel, we’re moving the rondel itself and letting a printed arrow take the place of the pawn. You might also notice that the spokes of the wheels are raised, leaving recessed segments between them. That’s because as the game goes on you’ll add action segments to the wheel to either boost or replace the pre-printed ones.

You might think it makes coming up with a strategy easy. Add complementary actions to opposite wheels, and every time they cycle around you end up with a supercharged turn. Not so, makker. The wheel on the left has six sections, while the one on the right only has five. Given that you’ll only get to rotate the bigger wheel four or five times at the most, those stars won’t align after their first meeting. It’s actually pretty tricky to figure out which two are going to meet a long way in advance, especially as you don’t know how many segments that wheel is going to turn when it comes to your turn.

Flooding the market

So what are you actually doing in the game with all of these actions? Your biggest priority is growing tulips. Ideally growing them in neat rows of matching colours, while making sure you don’t repeat the same colour in each column. In addition to getting points for complete rows and columns, you’ll also get VPs for tulips of certain colours if you manage to get their associated windmills out on the main board. This is where my ignorance of The Netherlands’ topology and history reared its head. It’s not a country famous for flour or bread, so why all the windmills?

If, like me, you didn’t already know, they needed those thousands of windmills to pump excess water from the lowlands. It’s a country that’s famously flat and close to sea level, which means flooding is, and always has been, a real concern. You can’t grow tulips in fields more akin to rice paddies. Before you take a turn you can optionally open the floodgates. The floodgate marker has three spaces, and the space it’s on dictates how far your action wheel turns. At the bottom it’s one segment, the middle is two, and the top is – you guessed it – three. Opening them costs money but rewards you with VPs and allows you to get the actions you want back in range more quickly.

It creates a really interesting tug-of-war between the players, especially when there are more than two players. One person might be desperately trying to get an action back in range, flooding the place with reckless abandon, while the others want to keep the gates closed so they can milk every action on the way around. The longer the gates are open, the more the flood marker moves along its track, and in a nice thematic callback, you can get rewards for using actions to lower it. Turns out all those windmills you’re building aren’t just to make an interesting skyline. Pump water out, get rewarded with money and/or VPs. Living the capitalist dream.

Networking opportunities

One of the things Windmill Valley does really nicely is the way it ties different game mechanisms together. Along with the rondelesque action selection, the bustling market area where you jostle for position and aim to get the most tulips or planting opportunities, there’s also the very pretty main section of the board. It represents adjoining fields of brightly coloured tulips, and at the junctions of each of the roads which separate the fields, there’s a space to build a windmill.

Each windmill that gets built has to be able to trace a path of previously built windmills back to the market in the middle of the board. They don’t have to be your own, but for every windmill that isn’t yours that your path traces, the owner gets a victory point, and they soon add up. As you venture further out from the market the building spaces get more expensive, but offer more rewards, as you take the actions and resources from the adjacent fields. This is all before we even take into account the helper cards which either slot into the top of your board to reward you with things like more powerful actions, or into the bottom to offer more end-of-game scoring opportunities.

Each little piece of the puzzle contributes towards a really tight, enjoyable game with a passive but ever-present level of player interaction. There’s no take-that. There’s no directly screwing someone over, but the consequences of one player’s choices for their own benefit can send out big ripples of annoyance to the others. I love it. I love it when something in a game throws grit in the gears of your plans and you’re forced to adapt, and never has that analogy been more apt.

There’s plenty of scope for mitigation, not least of which being the tool tokens which you can use to increase or decrease the number of steps your wheels move on your turn. Even if you don’t have any tools, you’re never forced to move further than you want to because you can just choose to close the gates for free at the beginning of your turn. In doing that, however, you open the gate – so to speak – for the following players to open it again and add more VPs to their tally.

Final thoughts

Windmill Valley is a really good game. Bang in the middle of medium-weight with enough going on to satisfy heavyweight nerds like me without causing brain burn in less-experienced players. The components are really nicely made and satisfying to play with, even if punching out 200 tiny tulips is a ballache. The rulebook is clear and concise, and the game itself is a doddle to teach. The player aids are great, and the appendix in the rulebook is ideal too. My biggest complaint about the stuff which comes in the box is the sheer size of it all. The board is huge and by the time you add a player board and a set of action wheels for each player, you’re not getting everyone around a 1m x 1m table.

I think Windmill Valley shines with three players. The level of competition around the windmill network is just right and the game doesn’t drag. It’s still very enjoyable with two and four, but I haven’t had the time to take the solo mode out for a spin. The passive interaction is great, and naturally I love the rondel nature of the action wheels. It reminds me of Parks (read my review here) actually in that respect. Racing to the next full rotation and progressing to the next calendar track section (equivalent to the end of the track in Parks) might get you the best rewards, but at what cost? How much will you regret skipping those actions?

My biggest worry for Windmill Valley is how well it finds its audience. I applaud Board&Dice for branching out and diversifying from the heavyweight browns of the T series of games, but I can’t help wondering who is going to choose a game about windmills and tulips. Hopefully, plenty of people do, because I think this is a great example of everything a modern Euro game should be. Clean design, clear rules, bright boards, and just the right amount of mental overhead. I don’t want it to slip between the cracks and get overlooked. After Arborea and Barcelona, Dani Garcia is doing some great things, and Windmill Valley is another fine example of what to expect from him.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Windmill Valley (2024)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Pedro Codeço, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Windmill Valley Review appeared first on Punchboard.

That’s right people, I’ve got my finger on the pulse and am giving you – the game-loving, hotness-buying board game players – exactly what you want. 16-year-old games that nobody talks about any more.

Writing that last sentence made me sad. People should talk about Hamburgum. People should talk about it because it was my first ‘proper’ Euro game, and they should talk about it just because I like it, because the world revolves around me and what I want. People should also talk about it because it’s a stone-cold classic example of how to use a rondel in your games. People should talk about the cutthroat church building and ever-shifting prices of sugar, beer and cloth in the game’s market.

They don’t though, thanks in no small part to another game of Mac’s called Concordia or something like that. I dunno, I never heard of it. Apparently, it’s popular though. But you’re here right now, a captive audience wondering why the hell I – someone who would like to get more eyes on his work – is devoting his precious spare time to reviewing this old game, instead of fuelling whatever hype machine is currently ploughing social media. Let’s get into it.

With bells on

Let’s start with the thing you’re most likely to stop and go slack-jawed at the first time you open the game. The components. None of your plastic minis here, nor the bog standard meeples we’ve all grown to love. No, instead we’ve got chonky, purple, wooden church pieces, teeny tiny little pieces of wood, little bricks made of actual clay, and the pièces de résistance, the little metal bells, replete with working clangers.

That’s right. Tiny little bells that jingle when you shake them. Stick that up your 2ft tall plastic Cthulhu.

When you start the game you each have some little cardboard citizen tokens and some ships, along with some starting goods and materials. Most importantly you have an octagonal piece on the rondel, and it’s this rondel, and your choices upon it, which fuels the entire game. If you’re not familiar with a rondel, it’s a (usually) circular wheel split into segments, with each segment representing one of the game’s actions. Your turn is as simple as picking up your marker and choosing whether you want to move one, two, or three spaces around the rondel, and then taking the action you land on.

It sounds so simple put like that, but the rondel is a cruel mistress, and she’ll make you question your decisions, your mind, your very sanity with every choice you make. Do you go whizzing around, taking great strides in an attempt to get back to an action you have your mind set on, or do you take baby steps, partaking of every action along the way. It’s agonisingly glorious, and once you get a taste of it you’ll likely understand why it’s my favourite mechanism in a game.

A racing Euro game? Really?

Yes. In many ways, Hamburgum is a race. The aim of the game is to get the mighty churches built, but in order to do that you need materials. How do you afford materials? You trade goods. How do you get goods to trade? You build buildings which make the goods (e.g. breweries make beer). How do you make the trades? You build boats in the docks. Everything is dependent on something else in the chain, which results in a game which is very difficult to min-max. You really need to do a bit of everything and to make sure that when you do those things, you do them as efficiently as possible. You need to do them quickly, too, as the end of the game comes when the sixth church is built.

The landscape of the game changes constantly, and there’s a lot more interaction in Hamburgum than you might be used to. You might be stockpiling sugar ready for a big payday on your next trade action, only for the players next in turn to build sugar refiners, with each new building increasing supply and reducing the price.

Being the first person to donate to a church and place one of your discs on its site nets you the big-scoring donation token, with each subsequent donation giving the donating player a choice of the tokens left. But it’s only the player topping off a church, and spending those adorable little bells in the process, who gets the big points for completing the church. It means that Hamburgum is a game where you need to keep an eye on everybody all at once. Who can finish that church you’re working on? Have they noticed they can finish it off and snatch it from your grasp? How far away on the rondel are they from the all-important church action?

Alongside all of this is a network-building mechanism to really keep things exciting. When you build new buildings you place your citizen tokens on the board, but only adjacent to either an already-placed citizen or next to a church you’ve made a donation to. It not only affects your own expansion plans, but by paying close attention to others’ networks, you can get a good idea of what their plans are limited to and can try to put a stick in the spokes of their industrial bicycles.

Stripped-back

The thing which keeps me coming back to Hamburgum year after year is because of how simple it keeps things. I remember all those years ago when I first played it, having had no experience of ‘modern’ board games, I thought there was a lot going on. A lot of stuff, a lot of cardboard. Looking back now, and comparing it to more recent games, I can see just how streamlined the game is. For a start, you don’t have a player board. You just manage a little pile of money, cubes, tiles and resources.

There aren’t a ton of cards to spawn events, choose actions, add factions, or any of that jazz. There are zero cards. There aren’t even any dice. Everything that happens in the game is driven by the rondel, by a few wooden towers processing around the wheel of actions. I’d started writing here about how things are made better by removing a load of stuff, but the reality is that Hamburgum came out before all of the ‘more, more, more’ that we get in boxes now. Would Mac Gerdts still do the same things if he were making the game now? I have no idea.

What it means to you, the player, is that if you can find yourself a copy of Hamburgum (and you can, some stores have stock) you’re going to get a game that’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and most importantly, is fun.

Final thoughts

If you’ve gotten this far in the review and still don’t know what I think about Hamburgum you either scan-read it or have no short-term memory. I love Hamburgum. Some of that fondness is sure to come from nostalgia and a reminder of my first tentative steps into the hobby, but even when I try to become a robot version of myself and remove my own feelings from things, it’s still a great game.

It’s not heavy in terms of complexity, not by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn’t make it simple. There are a load of things all happening at the same time. Not momentous events crashing down into the game state every other turn, just small changes to the ecosystem, to the webs of networks being spun by the players, and the eternal Benny Hill chase around the rondel. Like a shark, forever swimming forward, so goes your fate upon the rondel.

Look, if you’re an old hat when it comes to board games and you never picked this up, it’s well worth getting hold of. It can hold its own against the El Grandés and Le Havres of this world, plus it’s another one of those PD Verlag games in a long, flat box, so Concordia won’t feel so odd poking out of its shelf alone. If you’ve only picked up the hobby in the last few years and enjoyed the choices that games like PARKS (review here) and Trekking Through History (review here) gave you, you’re going to like it too. Both of those games use a rondel of sorts, and you’ll soon find yourself enamoured by the bells and beautiful box art too.

Hamburgum is a bonafide classic. Keep an eye out for it at the next bring and buy you find yourself at.

Hamburgum (2007)

Design: Mac Gerdts
Publisher: PD Verlag
Art: Matthias Catrein
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 75-90 mins

The post Hamburgum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Iki rejects the usual tropes of samurai, ninjas, and bug-eyed anthropomorphic cartoon animals. Instead, it transports us back to feudal Japan, but instead of armoured warriors swinging swords, we take the role of artisans, hoping to make it big in Nihonbashi, the busy shopping centre of Edo (now known as Tokyo). I’m so pleased to see a game taking this approach, as town and city Euro games are usually set somewhere in Europe, and it’s great to see other cultures used as inspiration.

Praise the rondel!

Here’s the part where the review gets skewed by my bias. I freaking love a rondel in a game. It comes from my first introduction to them with Hamburgum, a game I still love. For the uninitiated among you, a rondel is usually a wheel of actions, where each player chooses how many steps around they move each turn. It creates loads of interesting decisions. The main mechanism in Iki is a giant rondel, which is tied into the design of the town. Each step around visits a different set of shops, and presents different actions.

Those shops don’t just come out of thin air though. The good folk of Edo didn’t wake up one morning and find a hipster-barista filled Starbucks in the street. The spirit of entrepreneurship is thriving in Edo, so you spend money to hire artisans, to open shops. On your turn, if you move your pawn (or Oyakata) in front of a shop, you can use the actions there. The actions do things like letting you trade money, rice, wood, and… sandals. The “ahh, that’s clever!” moment comes when you activate someone else’s shop.

When you build a shop, you add one of your little Kobun meeples to the card. If you use your own shop, not too much happens, other than getting the action on the card. If someone else uses your card, however, then your artisan – for some reason – moves up a space on the card, and a space closer to retirement. Retired cards get added to your player board, and there are bonuses on offer if you manage to collect retired folks of different card colours.

I’m the firestarter!

There’s a very unusual mechanism in Iki, which involves fire. The game takes place over the course of a year in Japan, and at three points in the year, fires break out. I guess it’s an occupational hazard when your buildings are made of paper and wood. As a result, firefighting is a thing in the game. There’s no way of knowing which of the four areas of the town the fire’s going to start, but you know it’s going to spread from the outside, inwards.

From a gameplay point of view, it’s a really clever addition. You can assure yourself of relative safety by choosing spaces closer to the middle of the board, but they’ll cost you more moolah to open. There’s nothing to stop you taking a “Damn the torpedoes!” attitude to fire, and just hoping the 1 in 4 chance doesn’t burn down your shops. It’s a risky game to play though.

So we’ve got a rondel, we’ve got cards and meeples, and we’ve got fire. This still doesn’t explain what you’re doing, and how to win Iki. I’ll ease the suspense, and tell you Iki is a game of set collection. Sets of fish from different seasons, sets of pipes and tobacco, and sets of retired artisans. Fish and smoking paraphernalia are in short supply, so there are a lot of tricky decisions to make. Trying to build your commercial empire may come at the expense of becoming known as “Fiona No Fish, the fishless failure”. Or something.

One of a kind

I played a game of Iki with some friends at the UK Games Expo, and we were talking about the game when something dawned on me. I can’t think of another game that’s anything like Iki. Lots of worker-placement games share the same DNA, and I’ve played any number of polyomino tile-laying games. While it’s true that neither set-collection nor rondels are new, the way they’re combined in Iki feels like something new.

The rondel, for example, isn’t the usual kind. Instead of choosing how many spaces you’ll move around, you claim one of the places at the top of the board which allow you to move 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces. If someone else claims the one you want, tough. You can spend the aforementioned sandals to add to your steps, but never go fewer. Towards the end of the game when players are looking to claim the valuable buildings, there’s a real race on to get the necessary resources, and those distance choices become hotly contested.

The same is true is many of the other mechanisms in the game. They’re the same ones you know and love, but they’ve all got a little twist to them, and are combined in really clever ways. I love the way your workers get more experienced when others use them, it reminds me of games like Caylus and Lords of Waterdeep – tempting your opponents into using your places. There’s a great ‘pass Go to collect £200’ thing too, whereby finishing a loop of the town promotes all of your workers. It leaves you torn between collecting everything you can, and getting those workers back off the board so you can use them again.

Final thoughts

Iki is a wonderful game. The artwork and presentation throughout is beautiful, and the graphic design is clear and understandable. For each season, when the cards and collectables refresh, there are more cards than you need, so you’ll always get a fresh combination of artisans to hire. There are so many neat little touches which add to the experience. Take, for example, the Harmony bonuses at the end of each season. Players who group like-coloured buildings together in a quadrant all benefit, so there’s this really juicy communal co-operation to exploit.

The board is double-sided, to pare the game down for two players. While two player is good, it’s at its best with three or four players. The extra competition for the shop spaces, and the extra choices with each turn, really bring the game to the boil. It’s so nice to see so many different, lost skills and jobs represented too. Hiring a puppeteer, Buddhist sculptor – or my favourite – the trumpet candy peddler, isn’t something you get to do in many games.

Sadly there’ll be people who’ll find Iki on BGG and think “A 2015 game? Why would I buy that now?”, and those people will miss out. The original looks very dated now, but the artwork on this new edition eclipses the first one. This is the game Iki always could, and should have been. It’s not complicated to learn, but there’s a ton of depth and replayability. This is one of those games which I was given for review, but there’s no way I’m letting it leave my collection. Fantastic stuff.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Games UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Iki is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Iki (2021)

Designer: Koota Yamada
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: David Sitron
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Iki Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Dávid Turczi is the brains behind Tawantinsuyu, the same mind that brought us Anachrony. It’s a game about raising a team of workers in the shadow of the Sun Temple, at the site of the ancient terraced Incan capital, Cusco. Along the way you’ll be constructing buildings and statues, weaving tapestries, harvesting corn and potatoes, and even going to war. But, as you might expect from a heavy Euro, the theme is only skin-deep, so lets get into the bit we’re all here for – the game!

Mixing Mechanisms

Much of Tawantinsuyu revolves around two main mechanisms: worker placement, and a rondel. In the centre of the board, atop the terraced pentagonal hill, players’ High Priests occupy one of five places. One of the two options available to you on your turn is to move your priest one or two steps around, rondel-style. The spaces they occupy let you perform one of the major actions available, such as conquering nearby villages or making your buildings produce resources for you.

Alternatively, you might choose to place one of your recruited workers in one of the spots available on the board. This seems pretty standard fare for anyone who’s played a worker placement game before. Find an empty space, pay any costs associated, get the thing from the space. But Tawantinsuyu spices things up here, and gives you so many things to consider that your brain could melt, in the nicest possible way.

Let’s Get To Work

I’ll try to illustrate just how many things you have to think about every time you place a worker. Workers come in five colours. Some you’ll take at random at the start of the game, the rest you’ll choose. Firstly, every worker space is connected to three possible actions, so there’s the choice of which one of the three you perform. Unless, that is, your worker is adjacent to another worker of the same colour. Then you get an extra action for each adjacent, same-colour worker. So now you might have three actions, so you can perform all three things, hooray.

On the subject of worker colour, each different colour has an associated bonus. White ones, for example, let you take an additional action if you pay one potato. Green and blue workers, when placed on spaces of their own colour, give you an additional action. All of those bonus actions are in addition to the adjacency bonuses mentioned above, so a clever placement can net you five actions from placing one worker.

But wait, there’s more! Each worker space has a symbol on it, and to place someone on this symbol, you need to discard a God Card with that symbol on it, or some gold. Oh, and you need to pay food if the space is on a lower terrace of the hill, and again if the space is on a different side of the hill to your High Priest.

So you see, the simple action of placing a meeple on a space on the board needs a lot of thought behind it, if you want to be efficient.

Controlling The Pace

If you read my review of Viscounts of the West Kingdom, you’ll remember that one of things I really liked about it was not having a set number of turns. Plenty of Euro games dictate that you’ll take a certain number of actions, then it’s game over. Tawantinsuyu is another of those that doesn’t do this, and it’s something I find myself enjoying more and more.

There is a set number of rounds in the game, but the triggering of the end of the round is done by the players. When the last worker from the village area is claimed by a player, it triggers a festival, and end of round scoring. But you don’t have to take that worker. Workers cost food to take, and there’s a second space to collect Nomad workers from. Or you could place a red warrior worker, which lets you take an adjacent worker from the board and claim them to use on a later turn. You don’t even have to place a worker, you could take a High Priest action instead.

This all leads to a really tense game of cat and mouse when the village is down to its last worker. You might avoid taking it, to try and get another action somewhere else, or you might take it just to stop an opponent doing the same thing. It’s another layer in this stack of complexity pancakes, and it just makes the whole thing more delicious, and even more to chew on.

Choosing A Path

Like Teotihuacan before it, there are a lot of ways to score points in Tawantinsuyu. What I appreciate in the design of this game is the ability to change your chosen route to victory partway through the game. Some games can feel quite punishing if you change strategy, leaving you unable to catch someone who chose well at the start of the game. If you’ve ever played 7 Wonders: Duel before, and decided to try to chase a military victory halfway through the game, you’ll know what I mean.

Tawantinsuyu doesn’t do this. I’ve played games where I’ve abandoned my quest to become the tapestry magnate of Cusco, choosing to become a bloodthirsty warmonger instead, and still won the game. The trick to this game is about using actions efficiently. After a couple of games, placing a worker and only getting one action from it feels deflating, like you’ve made a mistake. You haven’t done anything wrong really, but you’ve probably missed something that could have gained you more, and your own brain will beat you up for it.

If you want to play well, you need to have your wits about you, have an open mind, and be aware of what’s going on at all times. Which spaces are available? How many potatoes has your opponent got? Can their High Priest get to the rejuvenate action and revive his army before you start a conquest and mop up all the points? These thoughts and considerations, these are what make a game heavy, not the complexity or thickness of its rule book.

Does Heavy Equal Fun?

For some people, probably not. My wife for example, doesn’t like any game that feels like hard work, mentally. For people like me though, this game is Fun with a capital F. That abundance of choices is wonderful, and the clever ways interactions work in the game aren’t blatant, but are satisfying all the same.

Take stairs, for example. Any player can construct stairs as an action, and then they can place a cute little set of stairs on the board between the terraces. Stairs decrease the food cost for placing a worker on a lower tier. But if you use someone else’s stairs to do this, they get 1 VP for it. If you build steps on a lower tier, and your opponent built the steps on the tier above, they get 2 VPs for it. These don’t sound like big numbers, but games of Tawantinsuyu can swing on these small gains.

Considerations like these are what makes a game heavy for me. The actions you perform aren’t difficult, and there are no overly confusing rules or conditions, but choosing from the wealth of viable options is tricky.

Solo Mode

I’m a huge fan of Dávid’s solo modes in games, and Tawantinsuyu is no exception. Anybody who’s played against the Chronobot in Anachrony will spot the similarities. The Axomamma automa player has its own special player board, rules and die to roll. It’s really simple to run, following a set of priorities, and moving some tokens around on its board.

Axomamma plays a good game, and like all the best solo opponents, it does two things really well. Firstly, it has varying difficulty levels, which means you can start on the easiest settings and work up. This is great, as there’s something very dispiriting about getting hammered by a piece of cardboard or a few cards. Secondly, and the most important thing for me, is that it feels like playing against a human opponent. Axomamma earns resources and spends them, just like you do, and it really makes a difference to the experience of playing solo.

Final Thoughts

Tawantinsuyu is a masterclass in heavy, mechanical, Euro game design. The board isn’t going to win any illustration awards, but as an exercise in graphic design, it’s great. The iconography is clean and consistent, and once you get the hang of the game, the only time you’ll need to refer to rule book is to look up a passive building you haven’t used before. Thematically, I never really get the feeling I’m developing an Incan tribe, but that’s not what most people buying this game will be looking for.

This game is ridiculously satisfying, every single turn is like being a kid in a sweet shop – you don’t know where to start, because you want to try everything. I love the feeling of placing a worker in the perfect spot and getting a ton of stuff from the four or five actions it gives you. There are some parts of the game which – understandably – feel influenced by Teotihuacan, most notably when each round ends with a special round of scoring. In Teotihuacan you have to pay cocoa for workers in your possession, and in Tawantinsuyu you need to pay potatoes for every God card you’ve got. The big difference though is potatoes never feel as hard to come by as cocoa did. It’s maybe a small detail, but it means I can enjoy the game more.

While I was writing drafts for this review, I was trying to make sure I covered any negatives in the game, and honestly, I really struggled. I think the only thing I’d say is that it takes up a lot of table, so if space is an issue for you, be careful.

If you like a heavy game, and you like worker placement, buy Tawantinsuyu. That’s how much I like this game. I haven’t been paid to say that, I wasn’t even provided with a review copy of the game. I bought it with my own money – which is affordable at the time of writing, at around £40 – and I’d buy it again in a heartbeat.

The post Tawantinsuyu Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’d asked me a few months ago who Devir Games are, or the same of designers Isra C or Shei S, I’d have just looked at you blankly. Thanks to some coverage ahead of this year’s Spiel Digital for Essen though, plenty of people saw this game about building the iconic St Basil’s cathedral in Moscow. I was one of them, and as soon as I saw the dice moving around a rondel, I was sold. I pre-ordered a copy and was lucky enough to get one of the small initial shipment to Europe.

What’s In The Box

As I eluded to at the start of the review, the most surprising thing about The Red Cathedral is that it comes in a small box. Not the usual Kallax-friendly standard square box size. To people like me, who like a heavy-weight game, that wouldn’t normally lead you to think there’d be masses of depth to the game. Less pieces equals less complexity, right? Well, not necessarily.

Each player has their own player board where they store their resources, where space is limited, as well as decorations for completed sections of the cathedral. There are also some spaces to store workshop upgrades, which I’ll cover later.

There’s a market board, which is setup randomly each time you play. The illustrations on this one, showing the seasons, are really pretty. The cathedral you’re building, the heart of the game, is represented by base, wall, and spire cards. There’s a good selection of each, adding some variety to repeated plays.

Finally the resources are really nice. Stone, gold, bricks and wood are nice little wooden pieces, and there are some shiny purple and green gems. My favourite pieces in the box though are these intricate little double-headed eagles from the Russian coat of arms which act as score markers. Overall, a nice set of bits in the box.

How Does It Play?

This is the bit we’re most interested in. What is the red cathedral, and how do we play it?

Concept & Setup

The game puts you in the role of a construction team. The plans for the cathedral to be built are drawn randomly from a deck of cards, and cards representing each section are laid out, to match the design. Each card shows the roubles (currency) and prestige points awarded for completing it, along with the resources needed to complete it, and a workshop tile.

To one side the market board is setup. Guild cards are placed randomly in each quadrant, and the resource tiles are placed randomly around the market. The all-important dice are dropped in a random order and orientation, starting at a specific spot and then advancing clockwise.

Finally, each player takes a player board and their matching banners, decorations, and a small amount of roubles to start the game with. During the game players are trying to earn prestige and recognition points by collecting resources, using them to build sections of the cathedral, then adding their ornamentations and decorations.

Gameplay

Okay, so we’re collecting stuff and building stuff. But how? On their turn a player can take one of three actions:

1. Claim a section. Players start the game with six banners, and using this action allows them to take one from their board and put it on a construction card to claim it. You can only choose a card that’s on the base, or directly above a section that’s either been claimed or completed. Each card has a workshop tile on, and when a player claims one they can pay the indicated number of roubles to place it face-up in one of the dice spots on their board. More on why this is important in a minute.
   
   Getting your banners out onto the cathedral is important, as they come from your storage space. This means when they come out of your storage, there’s more space for your gained resources. Managing this space is really important in the early stages of the game.
   
   
2. Send resources to the construction. This action lets you send up to three resources to the cathedral. These can be the materials needed to complete one of your claimed sections, or jewels and materials to add your limited decorations to completed sections. Completed building sections reward you with prestige and possible money too, while decorations increase your recognition and will increase your chances of a higher share of points at the end of the game.
   
   While you can only build sections of the cathedral that have your own banner on, you can add decorations to anyone’s completed section. Hmm, sounds like a chance to piggyback on someone else’s work to me…
   
   
3. Visit the market. This is where the strategy really comes in. On your turn you can choose any of the dice on the market rondel, and move it clockwise as many spaces are there are pips showing on top of it. So a five lets you move it five spaces. If the die you choose is white or the same as your player colour, you can pay a rouble for each additional space you want to move it.
   
   Wherever the dice lands, you claim the resources shown in that spot, multiplied by the number of dice in that spot. So for example, if your chosen die ends up in the spot that gives you two wood, and there’s already one die there, you’ll gain two wood x two dice = four wood. On top of that, you can use the power of the guild card for the quadrant you land in, which might let you do things like paying for extra resources, or trading yours for others.
   
   On top of that, if the colour of die you moved had a workshop tile on your player board (remember those tiles we could pay for and claim during the Claim a section action above?), you get to activate that too. It might be something as simple as ‘gain a stone’, but the really fun ones are the ones that then let you activate another coloured die and take whatever resources are at the same spot as it.
   
   Finally, all of the dice in the section you landed in are re-rolled, making for some interesting choices for the next player.

Prestige & Recognition

The scoring track has two sides. One is for prestige points, which are the equivalent of victory points in any other game. You score a point, you move your marker along one space. What you can also see here though are the eagle symbols, and these are recognition points. In the latter half of the scoring track, prestige and recognition track along almost equally, one-for-one. But earlier in the track, and therefore earlier in the game, each prestige point might be two, three, or maybe even four or five spaces along. Prestige is gained by adding decorations to completed sections, so managing to gain two or three recognition points early in the game can be the equivalent of gaining 10-14 recognition points, which is a big jump.

Once a player completes their sixth and final section of the cathedral, the end of the game is triggered, and final points are awarded for how much players contributed to each cathedral tower.

Final Thoughts

You might think a Euro with only three possible actions is a bit light, especially for someone like me who likes his games heavy and full of difficult choices.. And you’d be right, The Red Cathedral is definitely on the medium side of complexity. The important thing to remember though is that there isn’t a direct correlation between a game’s weight and how good it is. 6 Nimmt! is a game I could play forever, and it’s incredibly simple to play.

In short, The Red Cathedral is brilliant. It’s quick to setup and put away, it’s easy to teach and learn, and it does some really interesting things. I really like the dice rondel, it’s reminiscent of Teotihuacan, in the way that you can really ramp up the rewards if you manage to get multiple dice in one spot, but unique enough because you can pay to move further, and the dice get rolled after your turn, making planning ahead a real challenge. I absolutely love the combos you can build by moving one die, then activating another because you have its workshop tile.

Choosing where and when to build gets very strategic too. If you manage to complete a section above someone else’s area that’s still under construction, they lose points. But to do that you’re neglecting to maybe build a base section which tend to score really well. The fact that you can built your decorations on someone else’s section – and vice-versa too – means you have to keep a close eye on what resources and decorations each other player has. It’s equally frustrating and glorious to sneak in and score off the back of someone else’s hard work.

I also love the asymmetric scoring track. It’s possible to start the game collecting jewels, with a view to just decorating others’ sections, claiming big jumps for prestige points instead of recognition.

Replayability

There’s sometimes a fear with a Euro being a bit lighter, that it might get boring quickly, or be solvable. The Red Cathedral does a great job of negating that with the degree of randomness in every game’s setup. Where each resource goes on the wheel. which guild cards are drawn, and where they’re placed. Which design gets chosen for the cathedral. which workshop tiles are in the game, and where they are on the cathedral plans. All of these are random each time you play, and if that still manages to get too easy for you, the player boards have an advanced side too to make things more interesting.

In all honesty, Llama Dice (the collective name that designers Sheila Santos and Israel Cendrero go by) could have gotten away without this level of depth. We’re talking about a small box game here, which costs around £30. No-one is realistically going to expect something like Anachrony or A Feast For Odin, but what they’ve managed to put together is pretty much the perfect medium-weight Euro game,

Meet Ivan

Still not convinced? There’s even a fully-fledged solo mode in the box. Not a beat-your-own-score type either, it’s an actual opponent called Ivan who’s going to try to steal the best spots and decorate your buildings, through the use of an AI deck of cards. The bot is really finely balanced too, beating it is far from a walk in the park.

Solo is really important to a lot of people at the moment, with the current state of the world, and the lack of gaming groups, so to see it included and well-made is a major plus point. It also means you can practice on your own without having to play two-handed.

In Summary

In my opinion, The Red Cathedral is the perfect Euro to introduce people to the genre. There’s no imposing board full of iconography, there are no rules with exceptions. There’s only three actions you can take, and when you compare that to something like the recent Uwe Rosenberg game Hallertau, which has 20+ possible actions per turn, you can see how much easier it is to teach someone.

There are plenty of breakthrough moments for new players which I’m sure could help swing them into seeing the joy the rest of us take from this type of game. The first time you decorate someone else’s building part, or when you make the perfect combination on the market board and you end up with exactly what you needed for your plan.

If you’re a die-hard Euro fan though, there’s still plenty to love about The Red Cathedral. The planning and strategy you can employ rivals what you’d find in a more complex game, just with a couple fewer steps to get there at times. For the price of an expansion for a bigger game, there’s a full game here which I think anyone and everyone could enjoy playing, with family and gaming group alike. It’s a great game, and I heartily recommend it.

The post The Red Cathedral Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you answered “not many” to the question above, then I agree with you. Games normally use tiles or cards to represent buildings. but Teotihuacan lets you build a pyramid out of chunky tiles, and even decorate it too. Right there on your very own table! Is there more to the game than a gimmick and eye candy though? Read on, and find out.

A Pyramid Scheme?

Players represent noble families constructing the Aztec city of Teotihuacan. To win the game you have to accrue the most victory points through constructing the great pyramid, advancing along the impressive, and real, Avenue of the Dead, and advancing favour with the gods at the various temples. To do this you need to place workers around the city’s sites, competing with the other players for resources, technologies, and making sure you have enough of the currency of the day, cocoa.

What’s In The Box?

As well as those gloriously chunky and satisfying pyramid tiles I mentioned above, there’s a lot of stuff in the box. The game plays up to four players, and each player has four dice which act as workers, so there’s 16 coloured dice in there. There are some nice wooden resource pieces for wood, stone and gold, although the wood feels a bit small and thin compared to the others. The board is like the one in Nemo’s War, it unfolds to six times its folded size.

Other than that there are a lot of cardboard tiles for all kinds of things; discovery tiles which are picked up all around the board for bonuses, decoration tiles to add to the pyramid for VPs, and starting tiles which give the players a choice of what to start each game with. Then there are action boards, technology tiles, royal tiles and temple tiles, all of which are optional but increase the longevity of the game. More on this later. The rule book is really clearly written and isn’t too long, so it’s nice and easy to jump around to reference sections of it.

How To Play

Teotihuacan is undoubtedly a Eurogame. There’s almost no interaction with other players other than taking tiles they might want, or forcing them to spend more cocoa than they’d like on an action. You collect resources and spend them on things to earn you victory points. It’s pretty unique in how strong the theme is, but it ticks all the Eurogame boxes. Normally when you look at a Euro though it’s pretty easy to say ‘that’s a worker placement game’, or ‘this is a card drafting game’. With Teotihuacan though, it’s not that simple, as we’ll soon see.

Getting Started

To start with the board is setup as per the rulebook, and all players draft a couple of starting tiles. These starting tiles show them which resources or advancements they’ll start with, and which areas their workers begin in. All players then take three dice, and these dice act as their workers.

So it’s a worker placement game then, right?

Yes, well, no. Kind of. In a normal worker placement game, players take turns choosing where to place workers, sometimes sharing a space, sometimes blocking it, but they can normally place them wherever they want. In Teotihuacan, in order to place a worker in a space to take an action, you take them from wherever they currently are, and move them between one and three spaces clockwise around the board, like a rondel.

Ah, so it’s a rondel game.

Again, yes and no. Normally in a game where a rondel determines your actions, what you get as a reward is fairly obvious. In Teotihuacan, things are different. Your workers start with the 1 pip on the die facing upwards, showing them as a level one worker. When they carry out a main action, they power up, and you rotate the die so that the next number is face-up. On every action space there’s a table of information which explains what you can do and what you get for carrying out that action.

Production

Let’s take the Forest space for example.

What this table tells me, is that looking at the top row, if I have a level one worker who carries out an action, I get a cocoa. If it’s level two or three, I get a piece of wood. And it the worker is level four or five, I get two pieces of wood. So far so good. But what happens if I already have a worker in that space?

In that example, I look at the second row down, and when choose which column I’m looking at, I pick the value of my lowest worker there Think of it like training the new guy. So if I have a five and a one, I still get the reward from the first column, in this case just one wood. So you can see, planning who will be where is a really important strategy.

After your worker(s) take an action, one or more of them level-up, depending on how many were in the space, and if they reach level six, they ascend. “What’s an ascension?” I hear you ask. Although it’s never explained explicitly in the rules, it’s essentially a worker dying and being replaced (or maybe reincarnated) with a new worker. They rotate back to 1 pip on the die and are placed on the Palace area of the board. With that ascension you gain a reward from the ascension wheel on the board, which could be some VPs, movement up a temple track, cocoa, or even an additional worker. You also move your marker up one space on the Avenue of the Dead, which was a miles-long road in the real city of Teotihuacan, but in this game is one of the tracks to advance up.

Tracks

Lots of games have a track or two to progress along in search of riches and victory points. Teotihaucan boasts no less than six of them. Six!

Firstly there’s the Avenue of the Dead. One of your markers advances up the avenue every time you place a building on the Nobles area of the board, or one of your workers ascends. There are discovery tiles alone the way as rewards for getting there first, and at each eclipse, which act as round ends, players score based on their position.

Right next to the Avenue of the Dead there’s the calendar track. The white marker moves towards the black one at the end of each full turn, and trigger eclipses when they move past it.

Next there’s the pyramid track. Players move along the track one space for every tile or decoration tile they add to the pyramid. The player furthest ahead at the end of the round gets a bonus, everyone multiplies their position by an amount, and the positions on the track reset.

Finally we have the three temple tracks: blue, red and green. Certain discoveries and actions reward you with movement up one of the temples. You get a reward for every step, and along the way there are bonus discovery tiles to claim. Players who make it to the top of a track can expect big bonuses at the end of the game.

Cocoa

Cocoa is the currency of choice in Teotihuacan. The richest player will have chocolate pouring out of their pockets, probably. Cocoa is spent on certain discoveries, paying for actions, and paying your workers during an eclipse. Why you pay them in an eclipse I’m not sure, maybe direct sunlight spoils the cocoa?

If you want to take an action and other players are there, you pay one cocoa per different colour dice in that space. So if there were two black and one yellow dice there, my red worker would have to pay two cocoa. During an eclipse you have to pay your workers to the tune of one cocoa each, and one additional for every worker at level four or above. If you don’t have enough to pay them, it’s bad news, and it’s a three VP penalty per cocoa you can’t afford.

Various technology upgrades can grant you cocoa, and some discovery tiles. You can even take a five cocoa bonus when you ascend, but the usual way to accrue more is with a Collect Cocoa action. If you move your worker to a space with other players’ workers on, you can claim one cocoa per other colour, and one extra. So in the example above with two black and one yellow dice in the space, I would get three cocoa (two colours + one extra).

Worshipping

The final way to use your workers is to worship. Some of the main action spaces have a worhsip space. You can place your worker there to claim the discovery tile that’s there, to advance on the relevant coloured temple for the space you’re in, or pay a cocoa and do both. That worker is then locked. When a worker is locked they cannot move again, and you can’t use them until they are unlocked. To unlock a worker you either spend three cocoa during your turn to unlock all of your locked workers, skip your turn to unlock them for free, or wait for someone else to forcibly evict you from the space, paying you in the process.

Eclipses

The final thing to mention in terms of the flow of the game is the calendar track. At one end there’s a block representing the sun, at the other, one representing the moon. Whenever the last player completes a turn, or a worker ascends, the sun tracker moves down towards the moon. If at any point that movement would take it past, it’s the end of the round and there’s an eclipse scoring phase.

During the eclipse players score for their positions on the pyramid track and the avenue of the dead, and then pay their workers either in cocoa or cold, hard VPs. At the end of the third eclipse, the game ends, and the player with the most VPs when the dust has settled, wins.

Final Thoughts

Game mechanics are a dark art. The very best designers can take a mechanic and create a game that uses that mechanic beautifully, as Uwe Rosenberg does with worker placement (Nusfjord, A Feast For Odin, Fields of Arle). Attempts to mix them can have very mixed results however, as Flotilla proves in my opinion. The combination of hand management, tile placing, pick up and deliver, rondels, asymmetric play and more besides sounds like it could be Eurogame nirvana. Unfortunately it comes across as unwieldly and disjointed. So on the surface, Teotihuacan could have been a mess to play.

Thankfully, it’s a brilliant game. It’s a heavy game, for certain, but a brilliant one at the same time. There is so much going on at any one time, and so many options open to you on every turn, that on your first play you can feel swamped. One of the most basic choices is one of the most important – do you keep your workers close together to get loads of resources, or do you spread them around the board to always be close to a space which can give you what you need elsewhere on the board?

After the first game, when the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together, it’s absolutely compelling. It takes quite a few more plays before you even get close to seeing the whole picture. I love the fact that with the exception of the piles of discovery tiles (which you can look through and pick from when claiming one), there’s no hidden information in the game. You can see what level each players’ workers are, you can see how many resources everyone has, you can see how close to the next eclipse you are, and where everyone sits on the advancement tracks.

Replay Value

Playing Teotihuacan is playing a big puzzle, one which is constantly changing. In my experience, games can be very close when the scores are totalled, so every VP feels important. When you think you’re getting close to solving that puzzle, finding an optimised way to play, you can open the other bags in the box and change things up a little. There’s a whole set of action boards which can be placed over the originals, which change where things are. This means that your learned routine of ‘start here, get this, then move there’ goes straight in the bin. The same goes for the technology tiles, which are bonuses you can buy with an ongoing effect. And again with the Palace tiles, and the temple tracks. There are so many ways to keep this game fresh without even looking at one of the expansions.

I highly recommend Teotihuacan to anyone with an interest in Eurogames who isn’t scared of spending a game learning how the pieces fit together. Daniele Tascini has created a masterpiece of subtly blending mechanics to deliver a rich, thematic, ever-changing experience.

Solo

Designer Dávid Turczi was brought in to add a solo mode, and it works really well. The execution is even thematic, with the AI player’s moves determined by shifting tiles around in a pyramid shape. The difficulty level is adjustable in small steps if you want to make it slightly easier, or harder. Personally I’ve been using a digital version available here, which just makes the game play slightly faster, without changing it. If you don’t have a fan of heavy Euros nearby, solo is a great option which means you won’t miss out on what is primarily a game of multiplayer solitaire.

The post Teotihuacan: City of Gods Review appeared first on Punchboard.