Pyramids, priests and plenty of options

Designer: Fabio Lopiano | Publisher: Board&Dice

PLAYED

Among the ever-growing series of other Mesoamerican Eurogames, Zapotec has an immediate advantage: it has an easily pronounceable name. It also has another advantage, although this one is less obvious: for a Eurogame that comes with all the trappings expected of the genre, Zapotec is a fast-flowing game.

Zapotec is roughly divided into three strands of gameplay. There is the main board, where players compete in light area control by constructing buildings in various areas of the board and picking up tiles that will assist them with setting up their resource production engine. That happens on the individual player boards, where the tile is added to one of the spaces on the three-bythree grid. During their turn, players can select certain lines of that grid earning all the resources from the tiles activated this way. Finally, there is resource management. There is lots to build and everything costs a specific combination of resources. The most exciting constructions are the pyramids (which is the only real contribution of the otherwise immediately forgettable theme). Composed of several stackable pieces, the same pyramid can be built by different players resulting in aesthetically pleasing multi-coloured construction. As you would expect, there are multiple ways to earn victory points during the game including inbetween round scoring, progressing along the Sacrifice track, completing objectives (here known as Ritual cards) and earning points for various constructions.