LogFAQs > #897712428

33. Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126163/tzolk-mayan-calendar

Genre/mechanics: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity: 8/10
Game length: 75-120 minutes
Player count: 2-4
Experience: 4+ plays with 2-4 players, including on boardgamearena
First played: 2015

Tzolk'in is a worker placement game with a twist (or a turn, ho ho ho), with a Mayan theme. There are five "gears" on which your workers can be placed, and you start placing at the bottom vacant spot of the gear, where actions are the weakest. At the end of the round, the gears all advance, and in subsequent rounds, you may pull your worker off a gear to take the higher-action level - which is your typical resources/trade/victory point salad action.

Design - Most of Tzolk'in is kinda derivative but competent. The theme, the resources used, the necessity of getting more, feeding your workforce, a set game length, a bunch of technology tracks that improve your efficiency, a few point-yielding structures you can trade your resources for, and random other mechanisms that let you advance on "god tracks" for yet more resources and victory points. That said, it's all on a reasonably attractive board, and it feels satisfying to do, and not being able to feed your workers isn't that punishing.

However, the biggest part that's cool about Tzolk'in is, by far, the gear system. At the center of the board is a giant gear with a bunch of etchings on it, and after a round - during which you can either place workers to get onto the gear, or pick up workers to gain their benefit, but not both - the central gear ticks. This central gear delineates round markings, when you need to score certain tracks, and when you need to feed your workforce. But cooler than that is that it is physically bound to the other gears. So your workers, which are put at the perimeter of those gears, physically revolve around the gear when the round passes. It's a possibly gimmicky physical mechanism that really gives the game a fun kick, for a euro.

It helps that nothing gets in the way of just enjoying this mechanism. For a worker placement game, Tzolk'in is astoundingly not-mean. While only one worker can occupy a particular tier on a gear, you can put a worker on

Enjoyment - I have never won a game of Tzolk'in. But I've played it both in person and online (with the in-person variant obviously being better due to the physical gear presence). The relative friendliness of the game, as noted above, has me pretty happy to play it.

Replay - Would love to get at least competent at the game. As my pace of learning new games slows, this is one I might request to hit the table in coming months.

Bonus question - What's your favorite gimmick in a eurogame?

Hint for #32 - a title with a nice metaphor for the passage of time
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness