Wednesday 3 April 2013

More Incan Gold?

The events of last night's games were still fresh in my mind when I got an email from Sam. There was no time for rest and relaxation in Unit GNN. Oh, no. A new game had arrived and it needed play-testing: Tzolk'in. The game of resource management based around the gears of the Mayan calendar. There's a bit of worker placement and some of the turning mechanic of Macao. In other words, if you want to do something, you may have to plan several moves ahead. Each section of a cog gives you one action, assuming you have a man standing there that you can remove, and of course, each day moves the cogs round one section.

We went through the rules, with Sam having to go up and see his recalcitrant (hmm, good word. I should use it more often) child, Joe, who didn't want to go to bed. But he battled through the repetitive rule book and his equally repetitive offspring, and we began the game.

It was a troubled start, and we soon found it difficult to build up resources or food. There was quite a lot of living hand to mouth, as we both battled to have enough food for each of the four feeding days that happen during the year.

Jaffa cakes not included

In the rules, it describes bonuses for those players who got to the top of temples or maxed out their technology but, frankly, we were at a loss as to how to progress that far. Halfway through the game, a bunch of scoring systems came into play that Sam hadn't read the rules for, and suddenly he found himself quite a long way behind. I had managed to progress one whole step up each of the temples, which got me lots of bonus points, since Sam hadn't moved at all.


And this is why the title of this blog has a question mark. We suspect there's a good game in there, but we just don't know how to find it. It is not very intuitive, and resources seem a bit hard to find. It's also quite short, given the amount of setting up it needs. I assume it's longer with four players.

Andrew 47
Sam 34


There's something in there, though. Perhaps it needs a bit of research online before we find out where we're going wrong. With resources so hard to get, options seemed a bit limited. And the score track goes all the way up to one hundred. That's not possible, surely. You know, like how the speedometer on a 2CV goes up to ninety.

5 comments:

  1. We were trying out different wheels a lot and I wondering if specialising gets you the big bucks. Equally though, we may have just been green, or missing a small but key aspect of the rules.

    I enjoyed it. The turning wheels are definitely integral to the theme and mechanic, so they don't feel gimmicky. And there's something of Village about it in the fact that time plays a part (your workers don't die out, but the longer you leave them on a wheel the more powerful the actions are available to them. You just have to make sure you don't let them go past the actions altogether)

    I think it will be a much more intriguing game with three or four. With two you're asked to populate some of the wheels (hence the presence of red and yellow) before starting, just to mix things up a bit. But with more players plans have more room for overlapping and/or clashing.

    Definitely one to bring to the table soon!

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  2. Oh and the board is quite beautiful too

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  3. Yeah! I needs to play it!

    My favourite quote about this game is from the Shut Up and Sit Down review:
    'You could not be more emotionally invested in a corn cob unless you sat on one very fast.'

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  4. That made me snort air through my nose very quickly! Great quote.

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  5. We played again last night. Despite a sense of being more in control of our destinies, we actually did worse. I won with 45 points (2 worse than Andrew's debut victory) and Andrew at least improved the runner-up score with 37. Not sure what we're missing but we haven't cracked it...

    Another night I might have insisted on a rematch but it was 9pm and time for bed!

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