Designer Daniele Tascini is best known for 2012’s Tzolk’in. The Mayan Calendar, a complex, strategic game that used interlocking plastic gears to represent the passing of the seasons. Now he’s returned with another release that combines rich, brain-burning gameplay with impressive physical bits, and it sees him diving once again into ancient Mesoamerican history.
Teotihuacan: City of Gods casts players as citizens of an ancient shrine-city in what’s now present-day Mexico. It challenges you and your opponents to advance your social standing by hoarding goods, constructing buildings and demonstrating your devotion to the gods. As you play you’ll dispatch workers, represented by chunky coloured dice, to quarries, lumberyards and gold mines, and along the way you’ll help to build and lavishly decorate the city’s central pyramid – a three-dimensional structure that grows over the course of the game as players contribute to its development.
On first inspection, it all looks impossibly complicated. Teotihuacan’s board is a mass of tracks, stats and symbols that looks disturbingly similar to an Excel spreadsheet. But dig through its 24-page rulebook and it all starts to make sense.
The entire board, it turns out, is one giant rondel. You’ll move your dice around it, taking different actions based on the spaces they land on. Some earn you resources, others allow you to build houses. Some let you develop new technologies, or add wooden blocks to the temple pyramid.