LogFAQs > #966037712

38. Tzolk'in

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126163/tzolk-mayan-calendar

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Worker placement, resource management, tableau-building, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-120 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 4-6 plays with 2-4 players (in person), 10+ plays online

Tzolk'in is a Mayan-themed worker placement eurogame. On your turn - of which you have twenty-four, representing one year - you either place or remove one or more workers from the board. You get the actions represented by your workers when you remove them. Between your turns, The worker placement spots are all located on gears, which rotate one tick each round, moving each worker one tick higher on the track. By pulling off your workers, you generally collect and trade a variety of resources, increase your technologies and workers, and purchase monuments for victory points.

The most important part about Tzolk'in is its board. The board is absolutely fantastic - those interlocking gears have an incredible table presence, and it's an ingenious idea to let all the workers "age" (i.e. become more potent in power) by moving a single gear in the center. The central gear also counts as the game timer; each quarter-circle is marked with a feeding phase, while the full revolution indicates that the game is over.

Playing Tzolk'in and identifying goals can feel opaque. The game feels point salad-y; you can score VP in all sorts of ways, from building monuments to advancing on tech tracks to advancing on god tracks (which also give you midgame rewards). There are five different gears that each have eight different steps, and you've got both a limited number of workers and a limited amount of corn (the primary currency of the game), and you need to pay more corn the more workers you place at once, or the higher on a gear you place them. Sometimes you'll be forced to pull workers you don't feel ready to place; sometimes you'll run out of corn and have to beg while placing, or starve during feeding.

I have heard that Tzolk'in can be broken. I believe there is some sort of big-resource strategy that is pretty dominant, though I've never been able to pull it off. Because of the opacity of the strategy and tactics, I can sometimes feel lost.

There's a lot of game to Tzolk'in. I'd really like to get actually decent at it, since it's very satisfying when you actually can get something done in the game. Just need more reps and perhaps a teacher who can explain situations to me. The game can hurt my head but I like it a lot as a mid-heavyweight eurogame.