Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar is the latest release by Czech Games Edition, a publisher that up to this point has been known mostly for games by two Czech designers, Vlaada Chvatil and Vladimir Suchy. Tzolk’in is an attempt to move further afield and features two Italian designers: Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. So far it has been the most critically successful game to be released from Essen 2012, advancing quickly and effectively up the BGG rankings. It currently looks like it will easily make the BGG Top 25 and may even do better than that, though at this point it would be very difficult for it to make the Top 10.
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I played Tzolk’in for the first time over the summer in a couple of two player games. I liked what I saw and requested a review copy of the game. I have played the game a total of five times.
Theme and Components
Tzolk’in combines a pretty standard eurogame overlay onto its Mayan theme. There are a number of ways to get victory points, all of which can be easily explained as having something to do with the Mayans. Do you get victory points for advancing up the temple tracks? Of course you do! Do you get points for constructing these generic buildings that show up later in the game? Of course you do! That being said, the game is not entirely generic. There are ways to get victory points that could not be inserted into any random eurogame and a lot of nice thematic details have been interwoven into the game. They are just not in the majority, and if you require deep thematic mechanical ties in your board games then Tzolk’in is not for you.
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I like the look of the components, and in this respect, at least, the game is rather thematic. The artwork is evocative and fun and I particularly like the surface to the central wheel, which has a number of shapes that look quite attractive once they are painted and have inspired a number of gamers to attempt their own take on it. The included crystal skulls are also fun and thematic, and it is enjoyable to see them arranged in a little circle around the central wheel.
While most of the physical components are effective and solid, I cannot personally vouch for the component quality of the board. I, and apparently others who have received the game, have received boards that were ripped along the seam, so this seems to be a problem with at least the first edition of the game. This is particularly problematic as the plastic wheels are inserted into these ripped boards, making the overall structural integrity problematic. Luckily, Rio Grande Games, at least in the US, appears to be pretty responsive to this problem though, so whether this is an issue for you or not will depend on how important it is for you that the game comes out of the box in perfect condition. It is very easy to correct it.
The Delightful Mechanical Core
Tzolk’in’s mechanical focus is its rather innovative worker placement system. On any given turn you are either able to place or remove any number of workers, with the only limitations being based on the number of workers that you have available to perform either action. However, you are limited to performing either placement or removal in a given turn and you must do one or the other. There are costs for placement, in the form of corn, that also impact how many workers to place and when to place them.
The wheels in Tzolk’in each have a number of associated action spots and will move one or sometimes two spaces after each player has taken their set of placement or removal actions. This usually results in an increase in the quality of the available removal and frequently provides a shift in the type of action available. Players are required to place workers in the first available spot on any given wheel, with spots that are further along the line costing more corn. This is meant to reduce the attractiveness of being able to place a worker farther along the track after other players have done so and is generally successful; there is a delightful bit of ambiguity in determining when or where placing after others is worth the cost of doing so.
This is the part of Tzolk’in that I like the most. The pressure that you feel as the gears relentlessly move towards the game’s inevitable conclusion is sufficient to keep me engaged and focused on trying to ensure that every placement I make matters and adds to my chance to win or at least not embarrass myself. Part of this is due to the number of avenues of competition that the game provides. Buildings are limited, and some of them are attractive enough that there will be some pretty direct competition to get them before your opponents. Getting first on a temple track during a temple scoring phase, or being high enough along them to get bonus resources during the temple phases are both pretty strong time pressures. Combined they make what could have been a pretty languid optimization game something that is a little bit more entertaining even when you move past any initial excitement over the novelty of the wheels.
Unfortunately the intriguing and novel mechanical core is surrounded by additional mechanical structures that are not nearly as interesting and exciting as this core.
Separating a Worker Placement Game From the Pack
Two of Tzolk’in’s five gears give resources; nothing more, nothing less. Two of them convert resources into things. The last one lets you take the pretty crystal skulls and get some combination of victory points, tech advancements, and resource cubes. Mostly, they are about as boring as they sound. There are a few exceptions here and there, the most noteworthy of which is how the game emulates the particular farming dynamics of the Yucatan on the Palenque wheel as players can exhaust available farming land and need to cut down forests, or burn them down, to access more. Essentially, the second through fifth Palenque spaces each have four spots on them. All of them have four corn tiles, and the third through fifth spaces have wood tiles placed on top of them. Whenever someone gets wood from one of these spaces they get a wood tile, and whenever someone gets corn they take a corn tile. If these tiles are not available, and a corn tile being underneath a wood tile counts as unavailable, then a player cannot take an action to collect the resources. The one exception is that, in the previously mentioned wood situation, players may choose to burn down the forest, discarding the wood tile, in order to collect corn anyway. This angers the gods and forces you down one space on one of the three temple tracks. The decision to take a corn tile or a wood tile is made only at the point in which they remove the worker, giving a bit of strategic flexibility. If conditions on the board change enough then the player can also switch gears, grabbing the sort of resources they want, assuming either availability or the willingness to risk angering the gods.
This dynamic, and the ability to overcome it by advancement on one of the four tech tracks, is something I like a lot and I think adds a lot of nuance and interesting decisions to the game. I just wish there were more things like this in the game. Instead most of the actions come down to, “I get this resource” or “I convert these resources into these victory points or go up tech track to increase my efficiency.” These sorts of things are fine. These things are the meat and butter of worker placement games. However, there are a lot of worker placement games out there. In fact, there are a lot of very good worker placement games which are able to take these bits and pieces and combine them just right into an entertaining and engaging experience. So the question that I inevitably have to ask myself when playing a new worker placement game such as Tzolk’in, is if the game has enough distinguishing features to make it a “very good” or “great” worker placement rather than one that is just “good” as good is not quite good enough anymore.
A large part of this analysis is based on your emotional reaction to the game. You simply play the game a lot and find out whether the game’s distinguishing features are enough to make the game feel different from other ones out there. But there is also some capability to add a more defined aspect to this analysis. I have not consistently done this in the past so, as an experiment, (yes, you get a review and an experiment all in one!) I am going to attempt it for Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar. This has the added benefit of highlighting what I think are the best parts of the game.
Unique and Interesting Things about Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar
1) Placement Mechanic
The Manhattan Project does something very similar with your decision to place workers or remove workers, though the Manhattan Project does it in a way that is arguably a little bit less unique as you get resources when you place rather than when you remove. Still, these are the only two worker placements that feature mechanics like this so I am willing to give Tzolk’in a positive score for this. This is important too because the placement mechanic is usually one of the most important parts of the game. If you are not doing something new here in a worker placement game you probably should not bother making one. However, I am also not willing to give this a big weight for the same reason. If you are not doing something new and interesting here why are you even making a worker placement? It is a threshold not something worth bonus points unless you do something really exciting.
2) Crop And Forests System
I described this above. This is the sort of fun flavor that I really enjoy. It is thematic. It adds some small level of mechanical complexity while also adding additional depths to the decision making. The only downside is that the need to harvest trees from forests is undermined somewhat by the ability to get wood willy-nilly, though in lesser values, from the Yaxchilan wheel. I understand why they did this, but I think it would be tenser if you potentially had to either deal with the ever diminishing forests or were forced to use the trading space rather than having another easy to access way to get wood.
3)The Crystal Skulls System
Crystal Skulls have one purpose in the game, and this is to place them in exclusive spots on the Chichen Itza wheel. Each of these spots gives you victory points and advancement on a cult track, and some of them will also give you a resource cube. While converting a resource (crystal skulls!) into victory points is not in of itself that interesting, the tight funnel involved in the usage of the skulls and the decisions that are involved in placing the workers to utilize them, particularly since the Chichen Itza wheel is longer than other wheels and you could end up with a worker on it for a long time, are such that I consider this to be interesting enough to count.
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4)The first player mechanic
First player does not normally move in Tzolk’in. Instead there is a placement spot that steadily accumulates corn and gives first player to whomever places there. There are two things that make this pretty neat. The first is that whatever worker you place here you retrieve automatically, getting the corn collected there in the process, rather than following the normal placement rules. This allows a lot of really interesting maneuvers. The second is that once per game, or more if you manage to make it to the top of one or more of the temple tracks, you are able to flip over your player aid in order to have the wheel move two spaces rather than one space if you selected first player that round, potentially disrupting other player’s plans while advancing your own ability to collect resources or place workers in the following turn. I like that switching first player is both not automatic but also comes with strong, but not overpowering, incentives to encourage players to take it.
And those four points pretty much cover what I think separates Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar from the default, “good” worker placement game. Now to provide a sense of my perspective, I am going to go ahead and do the same thing with another worker placement game that I have reviewed, and liked quite a bit, that has a somewhat similar average rating at this point in time: Ora et Labora.
Unique and Interesting Things About Ora et Labora
1) The Placement System
Much like Tzolk’in, Ora et Labora has a fairly unique placement system. You can use other people’s workers, you have one worker with different capabilities then the rest, and you only recover your workers when you have placed them all and the round ends; if you run out of workers you are out of luck.
2) The Scope of the Resource Conversions
Most worker placement games feature resource conversion of some sort. Very few games feature resource conversions as epic, complex, and grandiose as that featured by Ora et Labora. The conversion chains are complex, the rewards for diverging from these chains are high, and the rewards if you succeed in pulling full with your plans are fantastic. This combines into a form that allows for a higher level of drama than you would expect in a game that features producing whiskey and wine for a monastery.
3) The Spatial Element
Ora et Labora features a spatial system that, while similar in some respects to the one featured in Agricola, integrates a spatial element into the game that is quite distinct from other games. Players are forced to manage the peat and forests on their land in order to facilitate expansion but also have to be worried about potentially losing the ability to effectively collect wood and peat. More tiles can be purchased, potentially refreshing the supply of wood and peat but at the cost of using the money for tiles when they could be used for something else. All of this leads to an added level of pressure and decision making that is only compounded by the Settlement System described in #4, below.
4) The Settlement System
Ora et Labora replaces the feeding system that is featured in a number of worker placement games with a Settlement phase. The mechanical result is similar in that you are incentivized to collect resources in order to prepare for a big scoring opportunity however the strategic space opened by the settlement phase, and the thematic opportunities that Rosenberg implements, is sufficient to make this interesting even if it was not unique as well.
5)The Resource Accumulation System
While the wheel is arguably more of an engineering upgrade then a mechanical innovation, it does provide opportunities for things like unequal resource accumulation periods that would be much more difficult without something like this managing it. It also greatly reduces the quantity of human errors that can occur during the distribution of resources.
So I came up with four items for Tzolk’in and five items for Ora et Labora. In some respects this is fairly arbitrary, as I could have very easily stretched out some of the points for either of them into multiple, smaller items or condensed them a little bit. However, the items for Ora et Labora are more significant and more important for how the game plays as a whole. Most of Tzolk’in’s items, outside of its very cool wheel, or individual bits of flavor and are not nearly as significant and result in a lesser level of distinction from other worker placement games. In fact, a lot of the top ranked worker placement games have a greater level of differentiation from the average worker placement, with the differences affecting most aspects of the game experience.
It can be argued that innovation is much less important than simply designing a good, effective game and in many respects I very much agree with you. However, I have played so many worker placement games at this point it is not enough to just make a good worker placement game. It has to be innovative enough to catch my attention and be worth spending my increasingly limited amount of gaming time on. And that is why I am not able to fully endorse Tzolk’in. The marketplace of good worker placement games is pretty crowded at this point and unless a particular worker placement really stands out from those that are around it, it is difficult for me to let my appreciation for its unique elements to outweigh my boredom with the elements that are a bit more standard fare.
Conclusion
I like Tzolk’in and think it has some pretty solid gameplay, but at this point I have played enough worker placement games that neither of those are quite good enough. It has to either be exceptionally engaging or rather unique for me to want to explore it in detail and Tzolk’in is not quite able to reach either of those thresholds. People who are a bit less jaded then I am about worker placement games will probably like it a bit more than that, but at this point I can’t help but consider it a bit disappointing, particular in comparison to some of the truly unique and innovative games that have come out of CGE.
I played Tzolk’in for the first time over the summer in a couple of two player games. I liked what I saw and requested a review copy of the game. I have played the game a total of five times.
Theme and Components
Tzolk’in combines a pretty standard eurogame overlay onto its Mayan theme. There are a number of ways to get victory points, all of which can be easily explained as having something to do with the Mayans. Do you get victory points for advancing up the temple tracks? Of course you do! Do you get points for constructing these generic buildings that show up later in the game? Of course you do! That being said, the game is not entirely generic. There are ways to get victory points that could not be inserted into any random eurogame and a lot of nice thematic details have been interwoven into the game. They are just not in the majority, and if you require deep thematic mechanical ties in your board games then Tzolk’in is not for you.
I like the look of the components, and in this respect, at least, the game is rather thematic. The artwork is evocative and fun and I particularly like the surface to the central wheel, which has a number of shapes that look quite attractive once they are painted and have inspired a number of gamers to attempt their own take on it. The included crystal skulls are also fun and thematic, and it is enjoyable to see them arranged in a little circle around the central wheel.
While most of the physical components are effective and solid, I cannot personally vouch for the component quality of the board. I, and apparently others who have received the game, have received boards that were ripped along the seam, so this seems to be a problem with at least the first edition of the game. This is particularly problematic as the plastic wheels are inserted into these ripped boards, making the overall structural integrity problematic. Luckily, Rio Grande Games, at least in the US, appears to be pretty responsive to this problem though, so whether this is an issue for you or not will depend on how important it is for you that the game comes out of the box in perfect condition. It is very easy to correct it.
The Delightful Mechanical Core
Tzolk’in’s mechanical focus is its rather innovative worker placement system. On any given turn you are either able to place or remove any number of workers, with the only limitations being based on the number of workers that you have available to perform either action. However, you are limited to performing either placement or removal in a given turn and you must do one or the other. There are costs for placement, in the form of corn, that also impact how many workers to place and when to place them.
The wheels in Tzolk’in each have a number of associated action spots and will move one or sometimes two spaces after each player has taken their set of placement or removal actions. This usually results in an increase in the quality of the available removal and frequently provides a shift in the type of action available. Players are required to place workers in the first available spot on any given wheel, with spots that are further along the line costing more corn. This is meant to reduce the attractiveness of being able to place a worker farther along the track after other players have done so and is generally successful; there is a delightful bit of ambiguity in determining when or where placing after others is worth the cost of doing so.
This is the part of Tzolk’in that I like the most. The pressure that you feel as the gears relentlessly move towards the game’s inevitable conclusion is sufficient to keep me engaged and focused on trying to ensure that every placement I make matters and adds to my chance to win or at least not embarrass myself. Part of this is due to the number of avenues of competition that the game provides. Buildings are limited, and some of them are attractive enough that there will be some pretty direct competition to get them before your opponents. Getting first on a temple track during a temple scoring phase, or being high enough along them to get bonus resources during the temple phases are both pretty strong time pressures. Combined they make what could have been a pretty languid optimization game something that is a little bit more entertaining even when you move past any initial excitement over the novelty of the wheels.
Unfortunately the intriguing and novel mechanical core is surrounded by additional mechanical structures that are not nearly as interesting and exciting as this core.
Separating a Worker Placement Game From the Pack
Two of Tzolk’in’s five gears give resources; nothing more, nothing less. Two of them convert resources into things. The last one lets you take the pretty crystal skulls and get some combination of victory points, tech advancements, and resource cubes. Mostly, they are about as boring as they sound. There are a few exceptions here and there, the most noteworthy of which is how the game emulates the particular farming dynamics of the Yucatan on the Palenque wheel as players can exhaust available farming land and need to cut down forests, or burn them down, to access more. Essentially, the second through fifth Palenque spaces each have four spots on them. All of them have four corn tiles, and the third through fifth spaces have wood tiles placed on top of them. Whenever someone gets wood from one of these spaces they get a wood tile, and whenever someone gets corn they take a corn tile. If these tiles are not available, and a corn tile being underneath a wood tile counts as unavailable, then a player cannot take an action to collect the resources. The one exception is that, in the previously mentioned wood situation, players may choose to burn down the forest, discarding the wood tile, in order to collect corn anyway. This angers the gods and forces you down one space on one of the three temple tracks. The decision to take a corn tile or a wood tile is made only at the point in which they remove the worker, giving a bit of strategic flexibility. If conditions on the board change enough then the player can also switch gears, grabbing the sort of resources they want, assuming either availability or the willingness to risk angering the gods.
This dynamic, and the ability to overcome it by advancement on one of the four tech tracks, is something I like a lot and I think adds a lot of nuance and interesting decisions to the game. I just wish there were more things like this in the game. Instead most of the actions come down to, “I get this resource” or “I convert these resources into these victory points or go up tech track to increase my efficiency.” These sorts of things are fine. These things are the meat and butter of worker placement games. However, there are a lot of worker placement games out there. In fact, there are a lot of very good worker placement games which are able to take these bits and pieces and combine them just right into an entertaining and engaging experience. So the question that I inevitably have to ask myself when playing a new worker placement game such as Tzolk’in, is if the game has enough distinguishing features to make it a “very good” or “great” worker placement rather than one that is just “good” as good is not quite good enough anymore.
A large part of this analysis is based on your emotional reaction to the game. You simply play the game a lot and find out whether the game’s distinguishing features are enough to make the game feel different from other ones out there. But there is also some capability to add a more defined aspect to this analysis. I have not consistently done this in the past so, as an experiment, (yes, you get a review and an experiment all in one!) I am going to attempt it for Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar. This has the added benefit of highlighting what I think are the best parts of the game.
Unique and Interesting Things about Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar
1) Placement Mechanic
The Manhattan Project does something very similar with your decision to place workers or remove workers, though the Manhattan Project does it in a way that is arguably a little bit less unique as you get resources when you place rather than when you remove. Still, these are the only two worker placements that feature mechanics like this so I am willing to give Tzolk’in a positive score for this. This is important too because the placement mechanic is usually one of the most important parts of the game. If you are not doing something new here in a worker placement game you probably should not bother making one. However, I am also not willing to give this a big weight for the same reason. If you are not doing something new and interesting here why are you even making a worker placement? It is a threshold not something worth bonus points unless you do something really exciting.
2) Crop And Forests System
I described this above. This is the sort of fun flavor that I really enjoy. It is thematic. It adds some small level of mechanical complexity while also adding additional depths to the decision making. The only downside is that the need to harvest trees from forests is undermined somewhat by the ability to get wood willy-nilly, though in lesser values, from the Yaxchilan wheel. I understand why they did this, but I think it would be tenser if you potentially had to either deal with the ever diminishing forests or were forced to use the trading space rather than having another easy to access way to get wood.
3)The Crystal Skulls System
Crystal Skulls have one purpose in the game, and this is to place them in exclusive spots on the Chichen Itza wheel. Each of these spots gives you victory points and advancement on a cult track, and some of them will also give you a resource cube. While converting a resource (crystal skulls!) into victory points is not in of itself that interesting, the tight funnel involved in the usage of the skulls and the decisions that are involved in placing the workers to utilize them, particularly since the Chichen Itza wheel is longer than other wheels and you could end up with a worker on it for a long time, are such that I consider this to be interesting enough to count.
4)The first player mechanic
First player does not normally move in Tzolk’in. Instead there is a placement spot that steadily accumulates corn and gives first player to whomever places there. There are two things that make this pretty neat. The first is that whatever worker you place here you retrieve automatically, getting the corn collected there in the process, rather than following the normal placement rules. This allows a lot of really interesting maneuvers. The second is that once per game, or more if you manage to make it to the top of one or more of the temple tracks, you are able to flip over your player aid in order to have the wheel move two spaces rather than one space if you selected first player that round, potentially disrupting other player’s plans while advancing your own ability to collect resources or place workers in the following turn. I like that switching first player is both not automatic but also comes with strong, but not overpowering, incentives to encourage players to take it.
And those four points pretty much cover what I think separates Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar from the default, “good” worker placement game. Now to provide a sense of my perspective, I am going to go ahead and do the same thing with another worker placement game that I have reviewed, and liked quite a bit, that has a somewhat similar average rating at this point in time: Ora et Labora.
Unique and Interesting Things About Ora et Labora
1) The Placement System
Much like Tzolk’in, Ora et Labora has a fairly unique placement system. You can use other people’s workers, you have one worker with different capabilities then the rest, and you only recover your workers when you have placed them all and the round ends; if you run out of workers you are out of luck.
2) The Scope of the Resource Conversions
Most worker placement games feature resource conversion of some sort. Very few games feature resource conversions as epic, complex, and grandiose as that featured by Ora et Labora. The conversion chains are complex, the rewards for diverging from these chains are high, and the rewards if you succeed in pulling full with your plans are fantastic. This combines into a form that allows for a higher level of drama than you would expect in a game that features producing whiskey and wine for a monastery.
3) The Spatial Element
Ora et Labora features a spatial system that, while similar in some respects to the one featured in Agricola, integrates a spatial element into the game that is quite distinct from other games. Players are forced to manage the peat and forests on their land in order to facilitate expansion but also have to be worried about potentially losing the ability to effectively collect wood and peat. More tiles can be purchased, potentially refreshing the supply of wood and peat but at the cost of using the money for tiles when they could be used for something else. All of this leads to an added level of pressure and decision making that is only compounded by the Settlement System described in #4, below.
4) The Settlement System
Ora et Labora replaces the feeding system that is featured in a number of worker placement games with a Settlement phase. The mechanical result is similar in that you are incentivized to collect resources in order to prepare for a big scoring opportunity however the strategic space opened by the settlement phase, and the thematic opportunities that Rosenberg implements, is sufficient to make this interesting even if it was not unique as well.
5)The Resource Accumulation System
While the wheel is arguably more of an engineering upgrade then a mechanical innovation, it does provide opportunities for things like unequal resource accumulation periods that would be much more difficult without something like this managing it. It also greatly reduces the quantity of human errors that can occur during the distribution of resources.
So I came up with four items for Tzolk’in and five items for Ora et Labora. In some respects this is fairly arbitrary, as I could have very easily stretched out some of the points for either of them into multiple, smaller items or condensed them a little bit. However, the items for Ora et Labora are more significant and more important for how the game plays as a whole. Most of Tzolk’in’s items, outside of its very cool wheel, or individual bits of flavor and are not nearly as significant and result in a lesser level of distinction from other worker placement games. In fact, a lot of the top ranked worker placement games have a greater level of differentiation from the average worker placement, with the differences affecting most aspects of the game experience.
It can be argued that innovation is much less important than simply designing a good, effective game and in many respects I very much agree with you. However, I have played so many worker placement games at this point it is not enough to just make a good worker placement game. It has to be innovative enough to catch my attention and be worth spending my increasingly limited amount of gaming time on. And that is why I am not able to fully endorse Tzolk’in. The marketplace of good worker placement games is pretty crowded at this point and unless a particular worker placement really stands out from those that are around it, it is difficult for me to let my appreciation for its unique elements to outweigh my boredom with the elements that are a bit more standard fare.
Conclusion
I like Tzolk’in and think it has some pretty solid gameplay, but at this point I have played enough worker placement games that neither of those are quite good enough. It has to either be exceptionally engaging or rather unique for me to want to explore it in detail and Tzolk’in is not quite able to reach either of those thresholds. People who are a bit less jaded then I am about worker placement games will probably like it a bit more than that, but at this point I can’t help but consider it a bit disappointing, particular in comparison to some of the truly unique and innovative games that have come out of CGE.