Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun

For the final main course, I sat down with Tekhenu, Mr Turzci’s new work, which a certain influencer friend loves so dearly. I see it as a relative, if not quite a sequel, to Teotihuacan: roughly the same theme, dice placement, and point-salad structure, but noticeably more demanding. If the genre does nothing for you, there is no reason even to open the box. Teotihuacan feels more like yolo resource management to me; this is something much tighter, a Grand Austria Hotel clone with a considerable amount of thematic “chrome” stuck on top.

At its core is a permanent pool of dice. Dice are depleted as players choose them for actions and gradually return, so the choice is not merely “which action do I want now?” but also “which part of the shared system am I willing to exhaust?” That framework brings Grand Austria Hotel to mind, except that this design has layered far more things on top for you to keep track of.

The big twist is the obelisk and its shadow. Depending on a die’s colour and its position relative to the shadow, it may be fully available, available with a handicap, or entirely out of play until the obelisk turns. Dice picking is therefore not neutral: other players’ choices disrupt plans, availability shifts, and you are forced into constant optimisation rather than carrying out a solitary, untouched scheme.

The first time you see it, you can hear the little click of a circuit breaker going off in your brain. Especially if, like us consummate professionals, you place the obelisk shadow with the eye-candy side facing up instead of the side explaining where every die goes, the whole mess spread before you looks impenetrable. Two or three rounds later, though, you have got hold of it, and by the end of the game you have seen enough of its gleaming development to want another play. My one reservation after this first try is that it seems to reward single-minded commitment to one scoring path rather heavily, which is not something I readily expect from a point salad. But one game is not enough for a verdict: for now, Tekhenu has mainly left me with the feeling of a very good, demanding puzzle that I want to tackle again.