Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar Review

welcome to John gets games episode 4 today we're going to talk about Sulkin the Mayan calendar this is a medium to heavy wave work replacement game with a fascinating gear mechanic first I'll go over the rules and then I'll jump into my review all right so how do we play silk'n quick disclaimer I'm not going to go over every single niche rule in this game I'm going to do an overview so you have an idea of how it all plays out alright so to start we have this big beautiful quite crowded board with just a bunch of stuff on it but most notably this large plastic gear which spins five other smaller plastic gears this is definitely the the first wow selling point of the game and I'll explain that in a little bit it's mechanically very interesting in order to win this game you just need to have the most victory points we have a track around the board and if you were to distill this down as much as possible you're going to be taking these resources would rock gold and really cool-looking crystal skulls and you're turning these into picture points at the end of the game which is an entire round like where you you go entirely around this gear all the way around one ticket a time each tick is a turn that's what that's the game the person with the most victory points wins at that point alright so how do we go about winning this is a worker placement game every single person starts off with three people you can generate more through various means in the game but we start with three and on your turn you're either going to be placing some number workers as many as you can afford or want to place or you're going to be pulling workers that are already out on the board back into your hand you can do one or the other not both at the same time so I'm going to discuss placement first all right so I've seated the board with a bunch of opponents pieces to simulate what this game looks like mid game and so where can we put our workers they primarily go on these five outer gears around this main big gear the only spot that you can place a worker that's not on one of these five gears is this first player marker spot over here to take the first player token I'll explain that a little bit so each gear has a set of corn values associated with each middle tooth location going from 0 to 7 for most of them and then the blue one over here it goes to 10 it's a little bit here when you place a worker down you're forced to place it in the cheapest location so I would not be able to place this guy here because there's an open slot I would be forced to go here if I really want to I could put to my workers here to get to the spot but you always have to go to the cheapest all right so when you're placing workers there's a cost for the spot that you're placing like this spot cost one and there's also a cost for the number of workers that you are placing on this turn so if I was just to place the one worker then that would be one corn plus zero corn for placing one worker I've got four corn that's cool but in this game you can place more than one worker at a time which you usually want to do so I might take the second worker and put him over here in a zero cost spot now of course this isn't actually zero cost because when I play my second worker now the base cost is going to be one so my overall corn is cost it's going to be one plus one plus zero is two corn since there are no more zero cost slots available on the board and I only have four corn I can't actually place this because if I was to put this in a 1 value location that bumps me up to the third worker so that would suddenly be three corn plus one plus zero plus one is five and I can't afford it so I'm just going to bring this guy back pay my two corn and that is my turn because I decided I was gonna be placing this turn right in this case I was actually forced to because I didn't have any units out on the board yet so once everyone he has taken a turn and the play comes back to the starting player they're going to take a corn put it on the current tooth of the calendar the bigger inner gear I'm going to move the whole calendar over one tooth which is really neat because when it does that it moves every single worker on all the outer gears forward once to a more lucrative location which is the idea of the game is all about getting workers in early and not having to pay lots for the good stuff they get comes out of it so uh the other thing you can do on your turn is you can pull workers back and when you put workers back that's when you execute the actions associated with them so for instance this red one is associated with getting three corn and this blue one right here is associated with this spot right here and so on and so on around the whole board I'm going to go over them briefly and try and explain the ideas that are going along here so this gear is all about getting lots of corn and lots of wood corn is good for feeding people and wood is good for building all sorts of stuff it's just the the cheapest currency this is the kind of everything wheel as far as resources are concerned you can get wood rock gold crystal skulls and and kind of everything at the same time so that's what this gear is all about this gear lets you work on your technologies and you know building buildings and monuments for the most part the way these things work so this these two spots right here let you trade in resources to upgrade these science tracks odds are good some people are going to have some already but these are this is the engine building part of the game it lets you just buff different things for instance if Green was in this spot right here and they would take one extra corn every time they evaluated a green level gear and you notice the coloration wise is the only green ones on the board and so that means all of these technologies apply to that gear and for instance down here if green was on here then every time you build a building which has to do with yellow and red gears by the yellow and red icons you're going to get an extra coin so this just is a they kind of fall on top of each other there's a different engine building you can do here and the main reason main way you advance these is through this these two spots right here let you build buildings and the second one lets you build monuments and these are just one-shot things that let you get stuff so you spend two would you go in that spot you pull the guy back spend two wood and boom now you get to move up once on this top technology track for free because it's got little X's on the top etc there's just all sorts of stuff that's going on in here that at least in the top row that helps get your engine going and whatnot but they're just one-time use for the most part these yellow ones help you feed your workers I'll explain later these ones down here are endgame victory point monuments they just get you points for doing stuff and I'll go over that in a little bit we have this little icon here which kind of shows a little yellow and green and a red dude those are the three gods that are associated with these three temples the brown yellow and green um this is uh this is one way to get points and resources I'll explain it how what that means in a little bit this is just a way to you know move your tokens up on these temple tracks to get various other good stuff the yellow track lets you do all sorts of stuff for instance here you can spend three corn and move up on the temple track here you can trade resources for resources like crazy this is the main way that you're going to pull in new workers so you can go up to more workers and various other different things you can do build buildings of corn etc notice every single gear has these two last spots that are wilds when you pull a unit off of either these two spots unless you evaluate any spot below it and that's a good that brings me to a good point if say when red pulled this off they're going to execute this spot right here they can choose to execute actions that are lower on the track so for instance this one but it's going to cost one corn per time you go down so for a better example if blue here really wanted to go to the market you could pull this off and pay one to corn to evaluate this spot so you don't always want to go up higher you want to time everything correctly lastly is kind of the endgame gear the Chechen Itza this one when you pull a unit off you're actually going to be placing crystal skulls which you will have had to have had in your supply already and you get to place them in the spot and then you get points and you go up temple track and various other things and then this skull stays there for the rest of the game so that this blocks different teeth on this track so treasure needs a pretty interesting it's an endgame scoring spot so for the most part that is how the pulling workers back you can do it in various orders you know pull something to get resources to pull another one to build a building etc there's lots of combat combining that you can do with that now I'd like to talk about the starting resources in this game it's a pretty cool mechanic instead of giving you a certain set of resources at the beginning that you don't have a choice over you were given randomly four little tokens and you choose two of them in order to evaluate and you throw all of them back in the box but it tells you what you could start with so for instance if I chose these two I would start with a forth worker from the beginning of the game and I get nine corn and one Rock or I could do these two here get five corn one old go up once on the brown track over here and then get to technology advances in the same technology so that's pretty good so if I was yellow I could have moved from here over here and then from the beginning of the game I'm going to get extra corn and extra victory points for building buildings this if I did this would definitely indicate how I'm going to be playing this game I'm probably going to be trying to build lots of buildings because that's the way I'm starting but you know you could mix and match as much as you like it's a very interesting decision one other key thing is that if you are the starting player it's random in the beginning of the game you know you're not going to need that much corn to place your units in the cheap spots because the board is going to be empty so maybe you do go after this with less corn and just go for your engine versus if you are the last player then you know all these good spots are going to be full you're going to need lots of corn to put any guys down so now this tile might be looking really really nice to you so you get to just go back and forth and balance all these things out it's a very interesting decision that you get to make another mechanic in this game I said I come back to was the starting player mechanic and this is interesting remember I said that when the Year goes forward you're going to be placing a tooth and then go forward and then you're going to place a tooth you're going to go forward and you keep doing this and at some point someone's going to say hey that's a lot of corn on the the gear and I'm going last for a second to last and that's really bumming me out so I'm going to now choose to place my worker over here on the spot what happens the moment you take this spot is you get all this corn you can't use it this turn to pay for the placement of that but you get it for the future yay and then once everyone takes a turn then you're going to get to be the starting player which is great you get first choice well it's it's sometimes great sometimes you don't want to be starting player there's a lot of different strategies in this game but often times you want to be and it also means that you can use the one who has control of the wheel and you can do a double move which means you can move two teeth in a row once per game for the most part and you flip your player border over to the dark side to say you can't double move again and this could really mess up everybody's plans so taking this can be very interesting suddenly people have to pay corn to come back to the thing they want to do it's a it's a very interesting mechanic with a star player the last mechanic I'd like to talk about are the different seasonal spots in this game where you do a feeding and a scoring round so we begin in a teal then we're going to progress over to brown and then so on to teal brown and then back to this teal for the end of the game when you do both brown and teal you're going to be feeding your workers to corn each if you happen have a farm then this building feeds one worker and every time so that's nice but it's one thing to keep in mind when you're taking new workers is you're going to have to feed them so that's an interesting balance to make because that worker is going to get you more resources but it costs you resources and then the temples this is where the temples come into play when you do the brown level this is when you're going to get resources so for instance if blue here was up here at the 8th then they would get to beat to rock red would get a gold and green blue and red would all going to would you get all the resources that are below where you're at when we do these to brown locations when we do the teal which is going to be halfway through the game and at the very end of the game you can score the victory points for the temples so in this case blues at the top you get any points red we get four can you get three and blue we get minus two down here like there's a lot of points to be had here interesting note about the top here is when you go to the top you can be the only one there you can't share and entering this top location is the only way if you had been on the brown side to flip it back to the light side to potentially do the double spin again so that's the only way to do it it happens pretty rarely once we come back around to the beginning tooth then the game is over and we score victory points which you pretty much cash in your resources and then you do your monuments here these can be quite a bit of points at the end and as you can see they are quite costly to build this one lets you score your victory points on your your temples again this one gets you points for brown building you built this gets you points for every Crystal Skull that happens to be out the various sorts of things and once these are bought they don't fill in so you know what all the options are going to be unlike these buildings which will fill in as time goes on halfway through the game you're going to go to these second stack of buildings which are similar but different really worth discussing and then you see who has the most points and that person is the winner I'm going to start my review by discussing the things I really like about sulking uh to begin with the artwork is fantastic in this game every single part of the board you look at has great detail from little people on a path people harvesting corn and we got a temple being built just really really beautiful vibrant game the gears have great molded detail and them and also they just turn really really well it's very very smooth which I really like it's a it's a very well produced game from a mechanical standpoint these gears are awesome the way it makes a seemingly simple turn where you're either placing workers down or pulling them back up again and then adds this time element and the complexities it just explodes it's really really cool each individual turn of this game I really really like just thinking about the puzzle of how I want to get to where I want to go and where I need to put my workers to do that and do I have enough corn to do that well for instance I'm going to pretend I'm yellow I got four workers here and two are out so I have all six workers out and in two turns I really want to build this monument which is going to give me 18 victory points at the end of the game because of my six workers but I need three gold and three wood to do that I've got a golden tree wood so now I can look at the board and analyze the situation and realize that if I place my workers right here and here I'll be able to pull it off because when two turns happen later and I have my little tech track here well I'm going to get one extra wood for pulling this guy off so I'll pull this guy off take this wood here and now that's going to get me five would put my five wood over here and now the next thing that I know is that that's only going to give me one gold but I need two more so I'm going to pull this off which lets me go up to tech tracks so I got one two that's going to cost me five resources well I just got five wood so I'm going to put those five wood back here now with that allows me to do is every time I pull a worker back to get goal I get another one so I come here I'm going to get two gold for that put those into my pile and I'm also going to get to corn I would have spent five corn earlier I get two corn back and now finally I get to pull off my monument because I pull this guy back here he lets me buy a monument this monument costs three gold three wood I have three gold three wood I get to buy this thing and all this stuff goes back to the bank and that's kind of like a big turn and I've got the thing I needed everything kind of worked out and turns like that are just really fun working towards those and then you pull this off to pull this off to pull that off it really it's really really fun making all that stuff work so now I'm going to shift into the things I'm a little bit lukewarm about this game and the first one as you could probably imagine is it bed analysis paralysis can definitely creep into this game it depends on the people you're playing with but there's so much to think about on each turn and I really enjoy thinking about it but I enjoyed a little bit less when every other player is also taking their time to really plan ahead and figure out their turns this game can drag a little bit on sometimes depending on the players you're playing with it you could be thinking on other people's turns about what you're going to do but so much can change based on where they put their workers that you really can't do that much planning ahead I'm also going into that is the number crunching of the corn crunching figuring out you know the number of corn for them or players the number of workers you put down plus the spots that you placed them on the board and you making sure you have enough corn and okay well maybe you're going to do a setup turn so that in a couple turns you'll have enough corn to do your mega turn so you're thinking about thinking about thinking about turns turns turns ahead and ahead and it's you kind of need to do that to be competitive in the game the person that wins is the person who's going to plan ahead the best unfortunately sometimes that person also takes longest turns which can be a little bit frustrating um the one other thing that's a little bit annoying to me about this game is that the monuments they look really really similar to the buildings I don't know why they didn't make them graphically more differentiated it doesn't really impact the gameplay much and I guess one other thing to mention that can kind of be a potentially an issue with this game is that it is very busy for new players first time sitting down especially people who are not used to heavy games they might be a little bit intimidated by the board um that's kind of a minor thing though and it's happened once or twice but it's not that big of a deal so now I need to shift into the three things that I dislike about this game uh each of the three things individually are not that big of a deal but altogether it's it makes a problem so the first thing that I have a problem with this game is how the board is very se me the buildings the monuments it can be different each game and the starting tiles that you choose the beginning are going to be different each game everything else is the same so the gears are always in the same positions the technology this in particular the technology is always the same the temples are always the same and that does not make a game bad some of my favorite games have a very same e board but when you combine that situation with the second issue that I have with this game being that there are pretty much three paths to victory uh there's the skulls strategy where you put skulls down on Chechen Itza there's going heavy on temples from a very early standpoint so each of the the quarter and halfway points of the games the scoring of resources and victory points you get lots of points there and the other way is to go hard and heavy on buildings and monuments I you know getting corn and extra victory points and an extra resources resource discounts there's these three things so we got the skulls we got the temples and we got the buildings and you're gonna have to pick one of those uh if the game rewarded hybridisation doing two kind of doing two things that'd be fine but it doesn't you have to specialize if you do a little bit of skulls a little bit of buildings odds are very strong that you are going to lose to someone who just did temples for instance specialization is the way this game is played out so that I have a problem with that I like a game to allow me to be flexible mid game you know if I'm trying to do something and just people are blocking me too much I want to be able to shift gears haha and and do something else and still be competitive and you really can't stay competitive if you if you change your strategy from the beginning you pretty much your very first turn you're deciding one of these three things and if you don't just go hard on that whole game you might still enjoy yourself but you know if you want to win it's it's going to be rather unlikely that that's going to happen and this leads into the third issue I have with this game we'll all three of these things combined and that is that if multiple people choose to do one path those people are at a severe disadvantage to the person who happens to not take a path with competition so for instance in a four player game there's pretty much guarantee that - these people are going to pick the same path since there's three main paths to victory and that means if two people are trying to do the crystal skulls path at the end of the game they are at a severe disadvantage to the person who just does temples because they're going to be competing they're gonna be getting each other's way and when when you're trying to block someone from skulls you're not actually blocking them from temples or buildings that much and likewise if you have multiple multiple people going for the temples they're going to be all on each other's way for progressing up these tracks and if there's just one person dropping skulls like crazy on Chechen Itza they are at a very large chance to win the game definitely an advantage and so these three things really they combine to equal the reason I don't play this game very much anymore you know the same eboard myself that's fine but that combined with these three different ways to victory and if you happen to so you know when you take these tokens at the beginning of the game and you kind of decide what your path is going to be you know if I decide to do these two well now I'm probably going to go heavy on corn and that's going to allow me the flexibility to probably get lots of workers and maybe go for the the building strategy this person right here takes a skull from the beginning they're probably going to be going Chechen Itza so you really you pretty much you decide to out of your for the beginning of the game and you just commit to it and you're kind of hoping that no one else decides to do the same strategy with you because it's going to really hurt your chances to win the game they're still fun blocking there's still lots of interesting decisions to be made but having the person who's maybe just lucky enough to be doing a strategy that no one else decides to do in that game oftentimes to be the victor it's a problem I've played this game seven times and my excitement has is at a very steep curve I was so excited the first couple times I played and then it just dropped down to pretty much deciding that there's other games I'd rather play almost always because of the lack of flexibility being a good thing so all this together I think it's it's definitely a good game I think everyone who enjoys medium to heavy game should play this at least a couple times but as far as long-term replayability I played seven games I'll probably play it another couple times before it ends up leaving my collection but it's definitely not something I'm excited to play anymore

Channel: JonGetsGames

Views: 12,937

Keywords: Jongetsgames, Tzolk'in, Board Game

Id: sLlaDkCHcKk

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Wed May 28 2014