Dave Reviews: 2012

Tzolk'in

The way the Mayans kept track of years was quite intricate, and also misunderstood dramatically enough to prompt the creation of very subpar cinema. Tzolk'in does the culture a little more justice, at least in terms of making them the basis of enjoyable modern entertainment.

Is that a compliment? Let's... just say it is.

Tzolk'in is a game of eating and waiting. It's weirdly accurate to the Mayan heyday, where everything took forever to accomplish (by our modern standards, and also across every society in the world at that time), and most labor went into making food so nobody as few people as possible starved to death while waiting for anything to happen. Your goal is to gather resources which you can use to create buildings and monuments that will earn you the points you need to win the game, but underscoring all of that is making sure you always have enough food for your villagers when it comes time for them to eat. If you don't, you can beg for food, but that will anger the gods and cost you points, which are as real as those gods.

HEYO!

Pretty much everything happens on three giant dials that connect like gears and turn together as the days pass. Each dial has a bunch of person-sized spaces that villagers fit into; as the dials turn, they move your people from space to space on the resource circles. The farther along they move, the better the resource(s) they'll gather when you finally bring them back home, but in general that means leaving them on the dial for longer before they come back. Alternatively, you can jump them ahead if all the earlier spaces are taken, but then you have to immediately pay food equal to the number of spaces they jump (leaping into the future is hungry work).

One of these resource dials, as you might imagine, focuses on food. But it's not quite so simple as getting on and riding to the food number you want. First, there are trees on top of the food that need to be cleared. That's fine, really, because you need wood, but if you're desperate for food and all the land is still under the trees, you can burn the trees down. The wood is gone, though, and alas, you've angered the gods. In addition, for all but the first couple of resource spaces, there are only four wood/food tile piles; once those are gone, you can no longer use that space to gather resources, making food harder to come by later in the game, when you'll almost always have a larger population to feed.

Fortunately, the farm upgrades that reduce the cost of feeding your villagers aren't too hard to come by. That's a huge deal, considering that you just take the first pile of upgrades, shuffle them together, and flip them face down in a chunk. If farms were too rare, you could end up with games where everyone was struggling just to feed their people, which is a level of realism that tends to make games less fun very quickly. In addition, if your people are permanently fed by farms, you can ignore food, or you can keep collecting it in order to use it to jump ahead of people on various resource dials. Farms in Tzolk'in, as in real life, add flexibility to your society in terms of letting your people live better than a subsistence life.

Tzolk'in is a really good game, amazingly balanced in terms of allowing just about any strategy to win as long as you can be efficient with it. There's probably a way to say "the hell with farms" and make that work, even though I'm not sure what it is—I adore my passive upgrades too much to really go for a plan like that. It will, however, bend some people's heads in half and not let go until they walk away from the table on a promise to sacrifice a dozen virgins to Tzolk'in's dark gods. If everyone really knows how to play, it shouldn't take an excessive amount of time, but the number of games it takes to reach that point is such that you should probably expect it to always take longer than the game's ninety minute estimate.

If it sounds interesting after all this, you should definitely play it. If it doesn't... you'll know. Listen to the voices that warn you away.

Score: Ten crystal skulls out of twelve.