Founders of Teotihuacan

Founders of Teotihuacan is an odd Board & Dice release: light-medium, around an hour, and far removed from the weight and duration one normally expects from the publisher. Having played Tabanussi, I kept feeling that this was an unsuccessful early draft of its larger sibling. The theme is not especially interested in coherence either: in Teotihuacan's socialist paradise, you announce a building and it appears, politely accompanied by buckets of goods and raw materials. It makes little sense, but the abstraction does at least keep the game moving.

Each player has a personal district board and travels around it, placing buildings, temples, and sections of its central pyramid. Buildings provide resources, while fitting them into place produces a familiar, slightly listless tile-laying Tetris: does it fit, does it not, carry on.

Temples offer scoring tiles and special actions, while pyramid construction is the principal route to victory, since the final score links pyramid pieces to the relevant temple sections. Action selection is where the design remembers that other people are present: their choices close off or open up yours, giving the table just enough interaction to stop the exercise becoming solitary filing.

It is easy enough to put in front of non-gamers, and that is a genuine virtue for this sort of design. But the action-selection system is doing all the heavy lifting, leaving the rest as a rather colourless placement puzzle. It is an adequate game that could very easily have been much better.