Build your own ancient Mayan pyramid
YAXHA
Designer: Baptiste Vaiana | Publisher: Helvetiq
Publishers Helvetiq are most well known for their tiny box games like Odin, Bandido and their Matchbox series. I like to imagine that this game too, may first have been planned as a tiny game before deciding the coloured blocks were too fiddly. I have no evidence of this, it’s just a pleasing thought to me, imagining those playtest debriefs.
Yaxha is a pyramid building, cube placement game. It’s a swish looking box, classy and softly colourful. Its hallmark is a fun drafting mechanism in which everyone picks the set of bricks that they want, but if more than one person picks the same set, the person with a better turn order gets to take them. As a balance, they also then lose that turn order benefit. It leads to some interesting thought processes in which you aren’t just deciding which blocks you would rather take, but also how you might gain or keep the better turn order token. The game works with two, but is better with three or four. More displays to draft, more options or cubes, more folks to fight for the first choice position. With two, your choices feel very limited and there’s only so much logical placement you can do when you have a choice of two sets of cubes, neither of which take your fancy.