Founders of Teotihuacan

Founders of Teotihuacan struck me as the strange, light-medium, roughly hour-long Board & Dice release you do not expect. Having played Tabanussi, I could not shake the impression that I was looking at a draft from its bigger sibling that eventually found its way into production. Thematically, we are architects in Teotihuacan’s socialist paradise: you say “build it,” and the building magically sprouts up, along with buckets of goods and raw materials. It does not make much logical sense, but those leaps of imagination seem to have helped the gameplay come together a little better.

Everyone has a personal board, a district in which they build while moving around in a circle. We place buildings, temples, and pieces of our district’s central pyramid. Buildings provide raw materials, temples give scoring tiles and special actions, while pyramids are our main route to victory.

The real interest at the end lies mainly in scoring, where pyramid pieces count in combination with the relevant temple parts. The core is a rather flat Tetris-like tile-laying game, but the action-selection system saves it: it adds just enough interest and a small but noticeable degree of interaction between players. It is not a game that buries you in rules or procedure, and that is why I think non-gamers can comfortably approach it too.

Overall, I found it merely okay. It plays pleasantly, has an action system that keeps the table awake, and does not outstay its welcome. Still, with this kind of foundation, I expected something clearly better than a tile-laying puzzle that needs its action selection to avoid being immediately forgotten.