The Great Zimbabwe

The Great Zimbabwe is complex, but it doesn’t actually come with a huge amount of rules. Instead, some fairly simple concepts and procedures interlink with each other in a way that makes a challenging and highly interactive game.

The board is actually made of tiles that are laid out in different ways depending on the number of players. Your goal is to score X amount of points: 20 at the start, but that target may go up, or even down! – and you do this, principally, by raising monuments. Everyone starts with a level one monument on the board, but during the game you’ll be adding more levels to monuments, to a maximum of five: and scoring points for doing so.

Each round of the game follows three phases. In the first, players bid for turn order – not that important in the first round, but increasingly so as the game continues. The bidding takes place by putting cows – the game’s equivalent of cash – out on the players Empire Plaques, going left to right. Like most auctions, each bid must be higher than the last, but The Great Zimbabwe runs a kind of circular distribution of bids where cows get distributed over the plaques before returning to the plaque’s owner before phase two starts. That’s the action phase, where everyone – in turn order – gets to do one action. You can start a new monument by placing a disc of your colour at any empty spot on the board, you can place craftsmen, or improve monuments. You can’t do the latter without the former, however, so let’s look at craftsmen.

To take a craftsmen you must first take a Technology card that matches that craftsmen, and place it in front of you. The technologies allow you to have the matching craftsman, for which you pay a a purchase price in cows. The craftsman is a tile that gets added to the board, that wants to be within three squares of the resource it uses: wood for wood carver, clay for the potter and so on: these resources are clearly marked on the map. This rule of three also applies to monuments: when you want to improve them by adding another level, you must pay craftsmen within three squares (including diagonals) of the monument, and pay a different type of craftsmen/resource for each level it has before adding the new one: so for example, to add a fourth level, you need to pay three different craftsmen for what they produce. You can, however, reach them by using other monuments as hubs; as long as you can reach between your monument (ie three spaces max!) and the hub you’re using, you can use as many hubs as you like, paying a cow each time for the privilege. How much you pay each craftsman; well, that’s up to the owner, who can set the price at anything between one and three cows.

The catch is that every time a craftsman is used during a round, it temporarily blocks a resource. Say a potter has three clay resources in reach, it can only be used a maximum of three times in any round: each time a craftsman is used, a marker is placed to track what resource has been used up, before being removed at the end of the round.

When everyone’s taken an action, players receive all income from the cows paid to their craftsmen, and additional cows equal to the height of their highest monument, and a new round begins – unless someone’s won.

Around that basic goal of building monuments, The Great Zimbabwe offers some strategic options in the form of God cards and Specialist cards. Both offer you additional help, special moves, bespoke powers and so on – the explanations for each are straightforward. But! You can only take one God card in a game and never change it. And both God cards and Specialist cards have a down-side: they increase how many points you need to win the game!