OUR REVIEW

From Chichen Itza to Palenque

Tzolk’in

The Mayan Calendar

Take care!, This will be the shortest review in history: In your turn you must place a minimum of one (or more, if you want) workers on the lowest available space on one of the 5 cog wheels and pay the stated placement costs with corn - and depending on the number of workers you placed in accordance with a table - additional corn or you take at least one (or more) workers off the wheels and either receive the respective resource or corn or you can implement the respective action of the wheel. So, these have been 95% of the basic rules. It is phenomenal, with what simple basic principle you can make do in a top quality game!

As the foretold end of the world did not happen in December of 2012 I will have to tell you about the new game by CGE/Heidelberger in more detail. The board features, in addition to five cog wheels with the already mentioned revenues of resources and choices of actions (marked around those wheels), a big cog wheel in the middle of the board which is moved by one cog out of 26 and thereby moves the 5 smaller cog wheels. Due to this ingenious mechanics we are confronted here with a worker placement game featuring an entirely new mechanism.

The workers that you park on the cog wheels for several rounds get more valuable with each of those rounds, as the revenues in resources and choices of actions, in part also coupled with accruing victory points - rise continually in value. In addition to the cog wheels there are three tracks for the temples of gods, which yield, the higher you climb on their steps, victory points and also resources; and then there are three technology tracks, which offer different additional possibilities or improve actions acquired from the cog wheels or reduce the costs of such actions. And then there are areas for exactly 6 monuments (only those 6 are used in a game, but are randomly selected from a total of 13 monuments, so that there is enough variety) and six buildings. Those buildings are available from Level 1 buildings for the first half of the game (position of the cog wheel) and from Level 2 buildings in the second half of the game. The selection of buildings is replenished from stock - contrary to the monuments - after a building was bought out of the display.

I want you to take a closer look at the cog wheels with me. In Palenque you can only acquire corn or wood, when you take your worker back. Corn is essential - as already mentioned - for placing your workers, but also to feed them; that happens four times in the game at the so called Harvest Celebrations, when you must pay 2 corn for each worker. If you cannot pay this amount you lose 3 victory points for each worker you could not feed. It is very important at that time to know that you can also slip below Zero on the victory point track, something that is not explicitly mentioned in the rules. Furthermore, you can acquire corn harvest tiles in Palenque, not to be mistaken for corn, and wood harvest tiles, not to be mistaken for wood, which can score lots of victory points at the end of the game, if you happen to have built the corresponding monument and if it happened to be available.

On the cog wheel of Yaxchilan you can also acquire wood and corn, but also stone and gold and - most important - one of the coveted crystal skulls. The skulls are essential for generating victory points on the fifth wheel, Chichen Itza. You must deposit them there to be able to do any action on that wheel. If you manage to implement one of the high value actions at the end of this somewhat bigger wheel you are rewarded with a huge amount of victory points and also valuable advances on the temples of the gods.

In Tikal (the cog wheel of that name, not the game) you can, besides acquiring the right for an advance movement on two different temples of the gods, mainly acquire progress on the four different technology tracks or building and monument actions. This means that you have to acquire the right to take a monument or building tile with an action from the wheel and, of course, this costs a rather substantial amount of wood, stone and/or gold.

Out of all the possible actions available from the cog wheel at Uxmal I only want to take a closer look at one of them, that is, taking an additional worker from general stock into your personal stock. All in all three additional workers are available to supplement your starting group of 3. In each worker placement game it is usually your duty, or at least, essential to buy yourself more actions by buying more workers first. This is not necessarily the case in Tzolk’in, as I will have to feed those additional workers, a total of four times in the game. I have seen games of Tzolk’in won by a player using four workers and only acquiring this fourth worker in the last third of the game. But of course, more workers give me more possibilities to act and to leave them longer on the wheels to more easily reach the high-value revenue spots.

In Chichen Itza, as I did already mention, crystal skulls are essential to acquire points there. The crystal skulls are, by the ways, limited to exactly 13 pieces, so that you have to join the wheel early to not leave the high-value positions on this wheel to other players.

After each quarter-turn of the main cog wheel in the middle there happens either a hand-out of additional resources or victory points, depending on the position of your scoring markers on the three temple god tracks. The first thing that is implemented at that point, though, is the Harvest Festival.

Resume: Just like the cog wheels interlock do the mechanisms in Tzol’kin interlock. The strategies to win are manifold: This begins already with the varying equipment of players due to randomly drawn starting resources tiles. I have deliberately not detailed the mechanisms of fire clearing, beg for corn, advance the cog wheel by two cogs, fall off a wheel with a worker, take the accumulated corn revenue from the starting player, the final scoring, and so on and so on. You are continually confronted with considerations like those (only a small selection of them): How do I acquire, if possible, first, one of those valuable crystal skulls and how do I get to be the first on that wheel, too, to score most points; or do I do it the other way round, do I place a worker in Chichen Itza first without having a skull? Damn, I need cord to place my workers; an additional worker wouldn’t be bad, either, and to advance on one technology track or the other would be super, too; for havens sake, I have totally forgotten the temple god tracks; and that’s where you can really accrue a lot of points if you are in first position. To grab the starting player once in order to place workers more cheaply would be advantage, too. And this building, with which I can forget about feeding one worker would be nice, too, let me have it! And that monument over there, that would be the top, it would give me 18 victory points with 6 workers but the resources for that are soooooooooo hard to acquire.”

So you see there is a lot to do in this game, if only I could rid myself of those other players, who are permanently in my way. One this must be done in any case immediately, a copy of Tzolk’in must be bought, because this gem of a modified worker placement game can under no circumstances be missing from the games cupboard of an expert player. People, make room for it! Hopefully we will soon see more from those Italian designers Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani, and if it only were an expansion for Tzolk’in, which is bound to arrive! I‘m looking forward to it!

Gert Stöckl

Players: 2-4

Age: 13+

Time: 90+

Designer: Daniele Tascini & Simone Luciani

Art: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini, Milan Vavroň

Price: ca. 40 Euro

Publisher: Heidelberger / CGE 2012

Web: www.hds-fantasy.com

Genre: Worker Placement

Users: For experts

Version: de

Rules: de + en fr nl pl

In-game text: no

Comments:

New mechanisms with cog wheels

Amazing components

Simple basic rules with a lot of decisions in details

Compares to:

Other worker placement games like Caylus or Stone Age

Other editions:

Rio Grande / CGE, USA; Rebel.pl

My rating: 6

Statements:

A sophisticated worker placement game that keeps fascinating me with its cog wheels.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0