Designed by: Daniele Tascini,Simone Luciani
Tzolk’in combines a beautiful and mechanically impressive board – one that contains the moving parts of the Mayan calendar, that move at the end of each turn. The various cogs – or gears, as the game refers to them – interact with each other, and with the player’s pieces.
The game itself represents a year in the Mayan culture and the players are trying to glean the most points by gathering the most resources and making sacrifices to the Gods. On every turn a player must either place one of their pieces (- their workers) onto one of the gears of the calendar, or take a previously-placed worker off.
When workers are removed from a gear they have the option of taking the action next to the place they exited – the longer a worker stays on a gear, the more rewarding these actions become, but crucially players have to either place or remove a worker on their turn, so if they have no workers left to place they are forced to pick one up.
The actions either get the active player some more resources or move them up a particular track on the board – some tracks are all about your sacrifices to the Gods (and thus give points rewards) and some tracks give you additional benefits in the game itself.
Workers also have to be fed, and this is taken care of by corn, which doubles as a kind of currency in the game as well.
It's not heavy on the combative factor, but there are opportunities to close people out from where they want to go on the gears.
Tzolk'in is not a game for young children. Although they might love the way it looks, the game has a great deal of depth to play and familiarity rewards.
Tzolk'in offers a lot of choices on each turn: there are four gears to choose from in terms of distribution of workers, and then the potentially agonising choice of when to remove them.
Beautifully engineered and cannily designed, for the right group Tzolk'in will reward more with every play.
2-4
Players
14+
Years
90-120
Mins
Sam says
Tzolk'in might appear gimmicky because of the moving parts, but the game itself more than meets with the standard of the aesthetics. Tzolk'in can initially seem heavy in terms of its rules, and certainly working out your best move can task even the most familiar of players. But one or two plays in and clarity is gained; for older children and grown-ups there is an enormous amount of variation in the game in terms of strategy.