A logjam has broken, dear people. We planned on Tikal, we played Tikal, and Dana came back from trailing by four points to win by eight in the last scoring round of Tikal. The plan—deciding the night before what we’ll set down to the next evening—is a preliminary success. We’re looking at Notre Dame for tomorrow.
As the week wears on, we wear down, so I’m expecting this to be a short post. So I’ll get to the part where I describe the game:
Tikal won the SdJ in 1999, and it’s the first in what’s referred to as the “Mask Trilogy” because
Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling went on to design two more games featuring giant masks on their boxes: Java, and Mexica (mask photo by yzemaze). Neither of which I own, though I have dreams in which the three lurid boxes expand to fill the horizon in every direction, taunting me with their strange words for flax, metal flake, and meta-narrative. These are the nights when I should have avoided the extra shake of hot sauce at dinner.
The Carolina blue felt (you may take a moment to consider whether god himself is a Tarheel waiting for basketball season) wasn’t quite large enough for Tikal. This is a big game. You can bury any number of large and inappropriate things in this box. But the production values are wonderfully high. Ravensburger and Rio Grande do nice graphic work and pay attention to detail. As we were putting the game away, Dana said, “This must’ve been a bitch to develop and playtest.” She said this because all the parts synch up so very nicely. As you run out of the tiles that let you uncover temples, temple tiles with higher values start to show up.
But let’s back up a bit. When the game starts (photo here by duchamp), you’re staring at a grid of hexes. On your turn, you select and place a large hex tile. And then you get ten points of action. Different actions cost different points, with the least expensive options clustering around movement and uncovering treasure or temples. The game moves quickly, perhaps most especially with two people, and we both had a wild look in our eyes when we talked about what would happen if you added more players. And we were intrigued because there’s a bit of area-control, but that control is only important in scoring rounds.
If you can track Tikal down, snatch it up.
I want to add that I found this game in a combination game shop/used bookstore/aquarium supply store in Brookings, South Dakota on a weekend trip to visit friends who had been part of the gaming group we stumbled onto when we moved to Lincoln and changed the trajectory of our interests. And lord did we play some games that weekend.
Another topic to consider is how these game designs encourage an engagement with the rules and other players that seems more like puzzle-solving. While Tikal led us into tactical engagements, there were clear strategies that emerged, from the placing of tiles, to the development of temples, to the search for treasure. We both tried to maximize our positions for scoring when scoring happened, and we both jockeyed for position for end-game scoring. We were in position to block each other—and did—but the way scoring works (each of you gets a free ten action points to better your position before you score) forces each player to give up something from which the other player(s) will benefit. The design of the game blunt the edge of pure aggression. You can’t sweep in like you would in Risk, and there’s enough of a touch of randomness that you can’t plan exactly what you’ll do, though the size and option of the tiles mitigates against wild shifts in board positioning (and there’s an auction variant with the game that further erodes the randomness).
I mention the puzzle aspect because I stopped playing games in my late teens because I behaved badly around them (a good podcast about losing games is over at Pulp Gamer, nb). I got very intense and was quite willing to cheat to win. I found this behavior troubling, and with good reason. I just didn’t like myself when I played. Later, in my early twenties, I blundered into a group of martial arts practitioners and got drawn in. Over the years of hearing “invest in loss” and “eat bitter,” I learned to find the importance of losing and the skills that accumulate over years of hard practice. So when I came back to boardgames in my thirties, I was intrigued. It helps, of course, that boardgames had matured as well.
One last topic to throw out as a teaser: how do you respond to a theme of Central American exploration? There’s a bit of the Indiana Jones thrill, of course, but I keep having these creeping feelings of creepiness imagining that I’m sending a bunch of white guys to machete lianas off Aztec and Mayan temples while loading up on the wealth of a vanquished civilization. Talk amongst yourselves. This post got way out of hand, and it’s time for bed.
Comments