Tzolkin: Tribes & Prophecies Gameplay Runthrough

hey everybody today rado runs through Sulkin tribes and prophecies which is the first big box expansion says olkin which is an absolutely amazing worker place became really cool really unique if you don't know anything about Sulkin don't watch this video instead hit the link that's appearing on screen right there boom boom boom boom and that'll take you to the run-through I did a couple years ago for Sulkin because this run-through assumes you the audience know the bass game pretty well so I'm not going to spend any time talking about I'm just going to work on the assumption you know how the bass game works as I'm only going to talk about what does this expansion and try and demonstrate what this expansion brings to the base game and so let's actually talk about it first of all let's talk about those tribes it's one of the three things that gets added the tribes give every player their own special power in the way it works is you remember at the beginning of the game when you get several resource tiles and you have to pick the two that you want that determines what resources you have at the beginning you also get several tribe tiles and you have to you know narrow down to one and so in this game I have chosen the young who have a special power for the rest of the game whenever I place workers I pay according to this table instead of the original table and as you can see it's you know it's a subtle thing but I can save money you know normally it would cost me three bucks to place three workers but for the UN Cox it only costs to the really cool thing is the Yuma Cox can place two workers for free whereas normally it costs you one food one corn to place two workers so that's my special ability and you because I have that special ability one of the very first things I did is I pushed ahead so that I would be able to get an extra worker because of course being able to place workers jeepers means I can you know I it benefits me to be who's me to have a bigger work force than normal so that's actually pretty cool Jen over here meanwhile she ended up with the oh boy the ah the aha Chema has something like that and this tribe is actually really cool because if Jen wants to spend it when she's pulling workers off of a gear if she wants she can spend a corn and grab the next space so you know for instance right now you know Jen is here to pull the work off right now she'd be able to build a building but she wanted to she could pay a corn and the double technology advanced instead so that's actually very very cool - Jen has a further reach she can you know push the head at the cost of corn so and there's a bunch of these I think there's like 15 and they all have unique very different yellow there's no clones in here they all do like the owl chewy or cax they they're special abilities if you place two workers on a gear on the same turn you can remove one that's very cool I give you a ton of flexibility or the the the shaman AK who once during your turn you can exchange one resource block for corn at a rate given so you can get food if you're ever desperate for food and you know in this game you can get really desperate for food you can trade in resources for food that's awesome or the it's Zama when paying to advance a technology oh so you can you can advance on technologies cheaper than normal the McCobb you begin your turn with two less corn or if you have less than you know instead of having to beg you get you basically get corn for free so you never have to beg if you're getting low on money and if you do have to beg you get more food as well so they just van when the times get tough the becau pulled through you know so they owe this one the yeah Luke this one's crazy I actually tried playing with this this is a hard one to play you start the game with five workers instead of three which is awesome but your workers eat more food at the ED on every you know Harvest Food Day which to be painful and if you don't pay them you end up having to you lose more points if you don't feed your workers so you get this really big benefit but you have a lot you I mean so there's a lot of really interesting stuff in here like I said I think it's 14 or 15 tribes and whichever one you take will have a pretty radical impact on how you play the game so right off the bat that's the tribes and they're awesome but let's actually talk about the prophecies which I think we're even cooler so the beginning of the game is part of set up you set up the trough the trough sees the prophesies board over here and you pick three random prophecies and there's a whole bunch there's tons of these things and every time you play you're going to get a different combination of three and again it'll radically change the game now here's in this game there are three prophecies overcrowded cities whatever actually whether they called names you see I know that was overcrowded cities wrathful gods and yeah overcrowded there's a prophecy of in the second Oh what he called seasons years you know how the game is divided into four sections there's this first longer section in the shorter section then the longer section and the shorter section in the second section there is prophesized that the cities will be overcrowded and what that means is during the entire second quarter of the game if you want to build a building it will cost you one additional resource your choice so it gets more expensive to build buildings when the cities get overcrowded now that's a problem that's a real setback then in the third quarter there the setback will be if you want to worship the wrathful gods you'll have to pay extra food and in the final quarter because of the gold shortage if ever you try to collect gold it'll cost extra food so right off the bat you can see and you can plan ahead for the fact that it's going to be harder to do certain things at certain times in the game and so if you want to get uh you know if you want to you know increase on the temples a lot you'd better do it before the the gods become wrathful and Thule is totally frapping to what is going on over there Chula what are you doing settle down she's tearing all over the place anyway so and we know we had this problem coming up in the second quarter building to be more expensive so if you want to build buildings we probably want to put an extra emphasis to build them in the first quarter before the prices go up now Abney will get cheaper again later but here's the other half of the prophecy it is prophesized that during the second quarter the cities will be crowded it'll be tough more offensive build but at the end of the second quarter everybody has the potential to score points based on the number of buildings they built or potentially lose points to at the end of the second quarter if if you have not built at least one building you will lose five points ouch and if you've built two or three you get nothing if you've built four though you'll get six points if you've built seven you'll get thirteen now building seven buildings in the first half of the game that's unlikely but you can imagine if this were here in the last season at the end of the game this would become a really big thing you might want to push really hard to build seven buildings because there'll be thirteen points for you at the end of the game and actually let's look at the end of the game because of the gold shortage at the act once the you have to do the last feeding we will be able to trade in excess gold for points including up to 13 points and will lose points if we don't have it so we now have like all these mid and long term goals we want to hoard gold if we can because it's worth a lot of points at the end of the game we don't forget at the end of the game you want to use all that gold to build all your monuments cuz they're so expensive so these prophecies add a really interesting wrinkle they create problems for us but they also create opportunities and they're awesome and I'm going to show a little bit well really the way this is affected us right now is the fact that both Janet well one thing both Jen and I we know that pretty soon it'll be more expensive to build buildings so we're trying to mitigate that we both ended up jumping at the technology that when we build a building we at least get some food back to kind of you know soften the blow of the added expense so you know that's affected us right there and actually in this turn we're both going to try and build some buildings we'll see how that works out so a that's what the prophecies are all about the tribes are all about these special powers and the other well there's a couple other things too there's like some new buildings to get added and they have some special abilities going on but the other big thing that gets added to Sulkin is five player game now you can play this game up to five players and the game had to change in two ways the expansion gives you more wood and corn tile so you have more to harvest because of course there's just you you need more goods for all the people for the additional fee player but the more interesting thing is of course the gears didn't change and this game was really designed so that for people or you know fewer people if you put blockers in could you know really kind of vie for domination of these gears now with fifth players the gears would be way too tight so what did they do to fix that they have added a new bunch of work replacement spaces that aren't on the gears remember in the base game over here is where one player could go to you know chance to grab excess food and manipulate the star player marker now that space is still here but depending on how many players in a 5 player game there are now 3 additional spots players can go to to do what are called quick actions and now in a two-player game the quick actions can be used you have to block to them so in a two-player game there's only one quick action available whereas an a5 player game there's three of them and that's how you make more room for more players and now what are the quick actions well there's a bunch of them in fact right now at this point in the game the click action is if you come here to do a quick action which by the way cost you it always cost you one corn to do a quick action your reward will be you get a corn and a wood so for all intents and purposes you can get a wood for free just by placing a worker and like these spaces at the end of your turn you get that worker back so you don't have to you know you can get corn you can get whatever you need immediately you know the first one that was in the game which we've already passed over a couple turns ago was whenever you need to you can advance you can pay one corn in advance on a technology track so you don't have to spend time in to call you know building your workers up to do that and in fact actually we are about we've just finished the four turn so let's go on to the fifth turn now and see how this affects things a little more so I got to rotate my wheel buh-buh-bah there we go and then of course you put out another food so now it's looking tempting to grab that for food and you can see now the wheels have adopted a new quick this on this day there's a new quick action so we grab this we remove the old one and so now the new quick action is you can pay a corn plus whatever building materials you need to build a building so we have we can either build buildings by coming over here and spending time getting our workers into position to do the buildings or we can just do it as a quick action anytime we want and so that's a new one and as you can see you can plan ahead you can see that well actually it's interesting on feeding day the quick action will be get three food and caught you catch pay food to get that three food but we can know in the back of our minds if we're a little short on food near the end we can come here and get food really really quick which means we could plant spend our time doing other things as we have that as a fallback annular is getting stoned there's um you know converting goods to food and back firstly there's another technology thing and for the second half the game we don't know what they are yet but over time these the second half bonuses will reveal themselves as well because there will be quick actions all the way through the rest of the game and so interesting they were put in two expand spaces in a five player game but the rules come with a set of instructions basically if you block a few more spaces than you normally would on the gears you can add it to a 4-3 or two player game and so I've done that I've add a block some more spaces put the thing out and block those two spaces and so we're gonna actually demonstrate now in this new turn the quick actions in some other stuff so here we go I'm the first player so I get to go first I've got my two workers obviously I could you know I don't have any crystal sigil so this guy's just he's doing the long-term eventually I'll get a skull and I'll slap it down over there and that'll be a nice 13 points and blah blah blah he's you know he's a long-term guy and this guy you know he could've advanced his technology but I'm not really excited about that right now I'm gonna place some more guys patchouli I remember I get to place two guys for free it won't cost me anything and I'm going to place one guy on this quick action because I want to build a building right now I don't wanna have to wait until next turn when this guy comes up here alright so I'm going to build a building so it costs me one cup corn to occupy that space and let's see and so I get to build a building so I'm gonna build I think on the previous turn I had used a quick action to get this wood I didn't have any wood although that's another nice thing to the game came with replacement cubes so that the cube colors are now very very easy teller I remember how those gold cubes were really really hard to tell right from the wood cubes now you can easily tell the difference tween wood and gold because game with a bunch of gold cubes anyway so I've got a wood cube I had previously gotten this wood cube with the quick action and now I'm going to use it to build me a farm on that nice a farm and I did this because I played with gentle law I know the first thing she always goes forest farm she loves the farms and so if I hadn't snuck in here and grabbed it she would have built it and something I built it and remember my technology means I get another food because I've just built a building alright and I now know at the end of the prophesize second quarter I will not lose any points but if I get some more buildings I might gain some points so I was my first action I'm gonna place another one - and what tech I'm gonna go on ahead for food he's just sitting here and if I just if I don't pick that stuff up gyms probably gonna grab it so I got to grab before she does so I'm just going to come here and I'll grab four delicious corn and of course as always whenever you know this space get socked by by anybody the first player marker has to move so I'll have to give it to Jen but you know what chances are next turns she would have done it herself so I would have lost first player anyway but I might as well grab the food okay and so now the nice thing is at the end of the turn of course I'm going to get both my workers back isn't that awesome plus I'll get to do the you know the the thing twice and so that's actually pretty cool too so but what will come to that at the end of the turn so anyway that was me and now Jen she's got a worker she could place you know and she might have because she wanted to build her farm as well she loves that farm but she still has an option you'll notice her worker in Tikal is not on a building space but remember Jen's special powers she could spit she could pay one corn and she instead of using this action could use this action and so that's what she's going to do she's going to pay one corn to withdraw this guy and he will activate this action and as she let's see here yeah so and this is action where she gets to build two buildings and she only gets the benefit off of one of the more monuments you're not gonna build a monument right now but she wouldn't regionally plant and her whole plan was she she could have built the farm a while ago but she skipped it because she saw I wasn't going to get to build a building any time soon and so she figured she'd get greedy wait here and get to build two buildings for one and she had all the time in the world to get the farm but she wasn't paying attention to the quick actions and I was able to use the quick action to grab that thing even though I hadn't put the time in so Jen's disappoint you to get the farm but she'll build two other buildings so what's she gonna build let's see she's got a bunch of wood and one gold so I think she'll spend the gold and you'll basically get to increase you know and build that and see although hold on a second no actually she's not gonna do that she's gonna take this one this is one of the new there are four new axe one or a era eight let's say there's a first age and the second age buildings there's four new buildings for this stack and this stack and the these are all four of the new buildings she to grab this one which costs her two wood and a gold that goes away and she's going to grab this one which is another one of the new buildings which obviously you can see I planted the deck so all four new buildings or the aged one buildings would be out she's gonna grab this one which cost her three more so she has successfully built two buildings and now both of these neither of them have an immediate benefit but basically what they do is on feeding days every feeding day for the rest of the game Jen will get three food immediately that's even better than a farm plus every feeding day or for the first two feeding days general get an extra wood and extra wood for the last two feeding days Jen will get a crystal skull for free so those are both pretty cool you know that you know there's these kind of time than the other ones every feeding day get a gold although the last two feeding days if you want that gold you'd still have to pay extra wood because the gold shortage and this other one every feeding day you can get a stone so those are all awesome but here's what else is awesome you'll notice this new icon that means these are upgradable sites later in the game and this is a new concept of the game if Jen ever decides you're like maybe she doesn't care about crystal skulls so she's happy she got the wood early on but near the end of the game she doesn't care about or no actually mean yeah let's say she doesn't care about crystal skulls she's not really going to mess around with that at all so she doesn't care bout those crystal skulls what she can do is later on the game would say when she wants to build a monument like say this one which is a you know the really cool one that says you get one a two-player game you get six points for every monument built in the game no matter who built it so that's really awesome normally this would cost two wood to stone and two gold but if Jen wants she could discard this thing and that would pay for two wood and one of the gold so this would only cost two stone and one goal to build so the nice thing about these buildings is they're kind of a doubt if you're willing to give up their power later in the game there are down payment for building stuff later so Jen is setting herself up not only to get some nice benefits throughout the game but also to build monuments near the end of the game more cheaply everybody time when it's harder to get the gold that she needs so that's actually pretty cool so she built both of these and by pulling these two workers off the board and I put two workers on the board and now at the end of the turn of course you need work as it came here get pulled back for free and because I did the headdress I can jump forward one or two and I think I am going to jump forward to one - oops there we go and the interesting thing about that is by jumping forward - I have denied Jen the ability to ever be able to use this building shortcut and now I've gotten myself up closer than the next turn I'll get to build two more buildings before the before the prophecy comes about and it becomes more expensive so at the end of the first age I well if I get the resources I'll have built three buildings although I've only got one stone now let's see how well that works but anyway so I made the jump for two and prevent a gentleman able to do it and so now there's a new quick action get three food if you need it and then we continue on we're about to have to harvest then the prophecies the first prophecy will come into effect also when we hit this some of these not all of them I think half of them will get revealed then we hit the next one the other half will get revealed I forget it yeah I think that's how it works I'm pretty sure so we don't know what these are yet but slowly over time we'll learn what our late-game quick actions are also and that's pretty much it that's all the new stuff the game pushing on new buildings coming on blah blah blah so the the new tribes give you special abilities you saw both those in action I got to I got to do two actions for free that was awesome Jen she got to do an action she should not have been able to do we have these prophecies that are coming up and the quick actions the way they work and it's a subtle thing but these new building types are awesome I really really love this upgrade path thing really really cool because this game is all about long term strategy and these just become other elements a long term strategy now there are age there's for age to buildings like I did find this one this one's really cool is probably my favorite one if you once you build this drop one of your technology levels down so you can move three other technologies up now to be the other three it can't be one up three times that's really really awesome if you decide okay I don't need that tech anymore I want everything else to climb that's a really cool building and there's some other level two or aged ones as well but anyway folks that's it that's all the new stuff in Tolkien tribes and prophecies you'd like here's some final thoughts you can hit the button five four four three two one

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 28,810

Keywords: board games, rhado, board game, baord games, radho, baordgames, boardgames, rahdo, game, baord game, boardgame, baordgame

Id: VEwvnzl7UIE

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Reddit_Bork]

I've played the base Tzolk'in a bunch and Tribes and Prophecies twice. here's my take:

• If you're playing with anyone new, do not use the expansion.
• If you're playing with 5 people, expect to take a significant amount longer due to restricted options and additional Analysis Paralysis.
• For the love of god, don't play a 5 player game with one or more new people.
• If you know how to play but still haven't figured out an "ideal strategy", you don't need the expansion. It won't hurt though.
• If you find you're playing the same one or two strategies every time, play with the expansion. It absolutely forces you to do things differently.

[u/etruscan]

I love Tzolk'in, and I have to admit the Tribes looks pretty neat... but I just can't imagine adding more complexity to a game that already burns my brain hard.

[u/mattigus]

I discovered Rahdo recently. While our tastes probably don't match, I'm amazed by the sheer amount of videos he puts out.

[u/Funkativity]

perfect timing on this, I was debating ordering it just yesterday but it seemed a bit pricy for what was in it.. this should help me make my decision :)