16th Feb 2023 - Teotihuacan: City Of Gods

• Recent games

Teotihuacan is a familiar game at the club, having featured in the tournament last year. I first tried it then, so when David brought it back this week I was glad to give it another go. I'm a big fan of Daniele Tascini's series of "T" games - not least for all the obscure bits of history they've introduced me to. Teotihuacan's place in history is quickly clarified by the central feature of this game: it's one of the ancient Mexican cities whose most distinctive feature - the enormous Pyramid Of The Sun - gets constructed in the centre of the board as the game progresses.

I find Tascini's games quite intuitive, and they flow nicely, so their relatively high complexity scores on BGG seem a bit excessive. (Teotihuacan scores 3.8, which puts it on a par with Brass: Lancashire, of "the pretend-link between Liverpool and Birkenhead" fame.) Jon and Richard hadn't played before and arrived duly daunted by the expected complexity... not sure if they found it as heavy as the previews suggested in the end?

I was also surprised by how long the game took. Various people had warned it was a long one, but I didn't remember it as such. Still, even with a game of Vinhos running at the next table, we were comfortably the last to finish. Having played Vinhos myself recently and Tramways last week, I've found a rich vein of long-running games lately. Or maybe I'm just getting slower at playing them 🙂

Certainly there are many shorter games being played at the club. The group playing Navegador this week were all packed up by 9pm. And the remaining tables were reviving a club tradition from years gone by: the idea of bringing a selection of games and deciding on the night. I think they got through more than one game at each table - certainly things were going at a different speed than in Teotihuacan. I'm not sure if this impromptu method will catch on. But if it does I will have to get better at taking pictures of the games I see being played: without the website to remind me, I've completely forgotten what they were playing…

Comments

• RL

  Richard Levell

  I agree that this game is very interesting. I wouldn't say I was daunted by the complexity - the mechanics are mostly quite straightforward. What was challenging was knowing what to do to win. I had watched a two-hour YouTube tutorial (I know, I need to get out more) yesterday afternoon and noted what the presenter said about exploiting technologies. Which I promptly forgot, and it's no surprise that Robin won by a mile having, you guessed it, focussed on technologies. Regarding the length, it did take us nearly four hours, but as I am currently halfway through a multiplayer wargame that's expected to take four days, Teotihuacan seemed like a breeze. Due to our unfamiliarity, we did play quite slowly, and I am sure four players who know what they are doing could rattle through it in around three hours. Would I play it again? Definitely - having invested 6 or 7 hours in the game, I want some return on my investment!

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