Numenera: The Beale of Boregal

(I have moved over to WordPress – check out the new digs if you want to get join the discussion)

I finally got to play some Numenera. Kim had played an intro module atBigBadCon last October and really enjoyed it, so it wasn’t too hard to talk her into GMing a few sessions for us. She decided to run The Beale of Boregal, the first module from the core book, mixed up a little bit to both more fit her personal style and to be a jumping-off point for a longer arc.

My character is In Gwen Said (thanks, random name generator!), a Graceful Jack who Explores Dark Places. Ousted from the Explorers Guild by a rival and ostracized, Gwen is on the Wandering Walk – a mystical pilgrimage route through the Ninth World with no clear beginning or ending – as a sort of walkabout. Gwen links up with fellow-travellers: Kal, a swift jack trying to escape the consequences of the tragic accident that gave him a halo of fire; Vehm, a swift nano who fuses flesh and steel, who found it more convenient to leave town after he killed a high-profile criminal; Millord, the rugged glaive who howls at the moon and is on a quest to restore his family’s fortune; and Meck, the mystical nano who controls beasts and as yet has no backstory despite the best efforts of the character creation system.

The story starts off on the Wandering Walk with the standard meet-and-greet. Gwen and Kal are friends who did some artifact-hunting together in the past; all the other characters turn out, conveniently, to know each other in some way, so that helps. With pleasantries disposed of, the group sights a scutimorph on the horizon, with riders! On the off chance you aren’t familiar with scutimorphs, they are 6 foot high, 12 foot long millipede-like creatures that, as far as anyone knows, are untamable. So that’s kind of odd. The riders turn out to be a teenage boy and his badly wounded younger sister who, it seems, is telepathic or at least empathic. It develops that the two are fleeing a raid on their village, and looking for aid and healing. We don’t have the healing the girl needs, so we arrange for an escort to the spa town down the road while we trudge off to see what we can do for their village.

Said village is in the False Woods, so named (as quickly becomes apparent) because what looks like an orchard from a distance is actually a bunch of identical tubes, all hovering about 2′ off the ground, arrayed in neat rows and columns and supporting a net of some kind. And also, with scutimoprhs wrapped around them. As the villagers are trying to homestead on top of numenera they don’t understand, weird stuff has been happening: villagers are having bad dreams, animals in the vicinity are becoming unusually erratic and/or homicidal, stuff life that. After the nanos in the party spend a little time deciphering the numenera, to everyone’s general amusement, we follow the signs off towards the village of Embered Peaks which we suspect to be the source of the psychic disruption.

On the way we are ambushed by some Stratherian War Moths (because, if I’m a warped high-level nano wanting to bioengineer some killing machines, the first thing that occurs to me is to start with a moth). These would have been nastier if Kal had not remembered he had a cypher that could produce a large Wall of Cold, turning a highly dangerous encounter into a manageable one. Gwen shows off some archery skills, along with fast defensive maneuvering which leaves the moths blasting their heat rays at shadows.

On arrival at Embered Peaks, we find the small village in chaos. People are running around in madness. Houses are on fire. Millord detects a survivor in one burning building, and Gwen runs in along with Kal to try to effect rescue. Things start to go wrong when Kal decides throwing a small child out a second story window to safety is probably safe, and ends with Kal clinging to the other survivor and a Reality Spike mounted to nothing 20 feet off the ground while the house collapses around him and Gwen dances back out the front door.

Undeterred, at the heart of town we find a strange cult fiddling while things burn. Embered Peak’s claim to tourist fame is an oracle that supposedly lets people talk with the dead if they are in possession of the corpse, but in a way that a) only allows them to ask one question, and b) the answers are always lies. Gwen thinks this sounds not particularly productive, but whatever. It turns out to be trickier than you might think to formulate a couple of questions to ask that might ascertain the truth of the situation. This turns out to be important, as the numenera that powers this feat (and as a byproduct seems to be driving people in the vicinity to madness) is what looks like a person who has been hooked via tubes and wires to a giant artifact of some kind. The person has probably been there for a very, very long time. It’s really unclear to the party whether the person wants to be disconnected, put out of his misery, or what exactly and whether any of it would put an end to the ongoing situation. The local cultists are (perhaps unsurprisingly) not that helpful. After some back and forth in which Kal is revealed to have a complicated ethical framework, we try disconnecting. This gets awkward when the artifact itself seems reluctant to let its captive/host/symbiote go, and the party must fend off encroaching cables and tubes trying to capture them while disconnecting the captive. Eventually the captive is released! He seems to be a powerful fusion of flesh and numenera, so that’s a little scary, but he also seems grateful and non-homicidal! So that was probably the right answer. Problem solved. What’s next?

—

I’m a big fan of Monte Cook’s work – my favorite d20-style RPG by far was Arcana Unearthed/Evolved – so I came into Numenera with some confidence, even though the “billion years in the future” and “technology or magic – you decide!” hook didn’t immediately grab me. In the end, the game easily exceeded expectations and I enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed any RPG I’ve ever played. The character creation process is genius (and easy), the system of GM intrusions is fantastic, and the rest of the system is very lightweight and extremely efficient. The game world of Numenera is rich and engaging. At a high level it has a similar aesthetic to Ashen Stars: take something familiar (the fantasy d20 tradition), and then “reboot” it by introducing a few quirky, disruptive elements to make it novel. Numenera has gone a lot farther down this path than Ashen Stars did, though. It has (like Arcana Evolved before it) jettisoned all the elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and other baggage and completely replaced it with an entirely new, thoroughly-developed world designed both as a compelling fictional setting and as to support the peculiar requirements of the  roleplaying genre. The amount of creative effort that has gone into the setting is impressive: from all the strange creatures and races to the cyphers, oddities, and artifacts, there is a ton of depth here and it steadfastly refuses to fall back on cliches. There is a ton to like and I hope to be playing it for quite a while. I highly recommend it.

A Distant Plain

(I have moved over to WordPress – check out the new digs if you want to get join the discussion)

Although I wasn’t very impressed by Andean Abyss, I’m still intrigued by the idea of GMT’s COIN game system, so I went up to EndGame in Oakland to join in their biweekly(ish) wargaming group to try to give A Distant Plain a fair shot.

I’d actually played the game once previously in a near-final playtest version, and hadn’t been very impressed. It’s sill unconscionably long when payed to 5 propaganda cards, easily 6+ hours if the game goes the distance (today we played to the 3rd propaganda cards of a 4-card “short” game in 4 hours). The green faction (the Warlords here) is still pretty boring and basically just doing the one or two things that they do and praying nobody notices; however unlike the Cartels in Andean Abyss, the Warlords in A Distant Plain face extremely daunting victory conditions. The pacing is still pretty slow unless players make a conscious effort to move the game quickly. It’s still completely bewildering the first time you try to play it as each faction has its own set of actions available, and there is a proliferation of different levels players are competing on. The Government wants to control population and pad their Swiss bank accounts but doesn’t care whether their citizens are actually happy; the Coalition wants people to support the government at low cost but doesn’t care about military control; the Warlords want to keep the the state destabilized; and the Taliban just wants everyone to be unhappy.

The magic in A Distant Plain is the relationship between the (Afghan Central) Government and the (US-led) Coalition. Broadly speaking, the idea of the game is that there are two fronts in the war: the military battle for control of territory, and the battle for the hearts and minds of the population. The Government’s  goal is to physically control territory; they are only interested in hearts and minds to the extent that it allows them to engage in graft without the population immediately going over to the Taliban. The Coalition is interested only in hearts and minds, but you can only win hearts and minds by first militarily controlling territory. The two players don’t trust each other, but do have to share a checkbook and have some joint military command. Only one can win. Cue endless and entertaining bickering. This is the soul of the game and does capture the incredibly fraught relationship between the US and Hamid Karzai.

By contrast the positions of the Taliban is fine but far less interesting, and probably not going to keep you going for 4+ hours. The Warlords probably only have about 2 hours in them. So play the short game.

The other important thing I think A Distant Plain improves over Andean Abyss is that it amps up the power of the event card deck. In Andean Abyss, players seemed to quickly figure out that most of the events were really hard to justify taking given the opportunity cost (i.e., not moving pieces on the board). More powerful events mean more get used, which means more flavor, more tension, and quicker play – all good. One player felt like it might have gone too far, but I feel that’s unlikely. Whether it’s hit the sweet spot is hard to tell for sure obviously – this is a rather involved game – but it’s clearly closer.

Like Andean Abyss, A Distant Plain is a complete-information whack-the-leader and be-ahead-at-the-end game with simple and open scores. It’s not great, but at least at this point you should know what you’re in for. You need to be able to enjoy the journey here more than the destination.

Also like Andean Abyss, I remain somewhat frustrated by how superficially A Distant Plain treats the subject matter. For example, A Distant Plain portrays the Government as corrupt by making its endgame victory condition goal being corrupt (each time they take a Govern action, they convert support for the government into patronage, and win on a combination of military control and patronage, not support). There is no sense of or examination of why the Government is so corrupt, or the fact that the only way the US or the Afghan Government actually win this thing (or even establish the foundations for legitimate counter-insurgency) is by hacking away at that corruption. As long as that corruption is a fact of the game, the Coalition might as well go home. The  government was and is so weak because the real power outside of Kabul resides with warlords, which drives corruption at the center. But in A Distant Plain, the Warlords are just a warmed over version of the Drug Cartels from Andean Abyss. A Distant Plain would have been more interesting and authentic – at least if it’s really attempting to be a game about COIN – if it had not been satisfied with just having a great Coalition-Afghan Government relationship, but had attacked the relationship between the Warlords and the Afghan Government and the Warlords and the Taliban with the same vigor.

I also have to say I find the area control mechanics of the cubes-and-cylinders game not very evocative of the violence that has wracked Afghanistan. You’ll get some sense of the human cost inflicted on the Taliban as those units routinely get wiped out by Government and Coalition offensives and airstrikes, but the Taliban doesn’t seem to have the incentive or means to inflict damage on Coalition or even Government cubes. “Good guys” going to the casualty box will be a rare occurrence unless the Taliban can snag a good set of capabilities cards, and should not tax your conscience.

If you’re interested in the topic of counterinsurgency in general and Afghanistan in particular, I recommend Max Boot’s Invisible Armies, which is a solid survey history of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Also Fred Kaplan’s The Insurgents (not those insurgents) and Daydream Believers, as well as his many columns for War Stories over at Slate, in which he has discussed the surges and the complicated relationships between Washington and Kabul at some length. While I think A Distant Plain does an interesting job of tackling elements of the war, to me it relates the stories of the battles but not the actual fundamentals of counter-insurgency. Perhaps due to the currency and rawness of the topic it couldn’t do any more, but if that’s the case, why make it?

I’ve saved the worst for last, mostly because it’s the least interesting, but the design of the action cards which are central (and crucial) to the game is truly awful. The pictures are small and busy and you often have to squint at them to make out what’s going on. The text size is small and low-contrast and hard to read even when you have excellent light and are looking right at it, which of course you almost never are because it’s right across the board. The sandy background further disrupts the already terrible readability. It’s unforgivably bad and is a significant obstacle to enjoying actual face-to-face play (does all playtesting take place over VASSAL these days?). These needed to be either on larger cards with bigger fonts, or the pictures needed to be ditched, or something, because a crucial element of the game is borderline unusable.

So I won’t deny there are a number of things about the game that bug me, some of them pretty significant. I’m trying to decide if the fact that it has one really great thing plus a generally more nuanced and interesting texture than Andean Abyss makes it worth playing. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do think it has a lot more going for it than the previous game did. Even if it’s not a panacea, the central driver of the US-Afghanistan relationship gives the game a soul that Andean Abyss lacked. The better and more interesting event mix gives the game a bit more energy and motion. I think if you know what you’re getting into and set expectations appropriately it’s worth a shot, although some experience with the much shorter Cuba Libre will be valuable in making it less daunting. Just stick to the short game, and make sure the pace moves.

Pathfinder Adventure Cardgame

For a guy who ostensibly thinks dungeon-crawling is stupid, I sure have played a lot of games in that genre of late. The latest is Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game, a cooperative game from Paizo Publishing, and it's not bad.

The game is a quite faithful port of the Pathfinder/D&D3 roleplaying experience, minus the actual roleplaying (which is traditionally optional anyway). You've got a character with strength, dexterity, wisdom, and so on, each rated as a die size (d4, d6, d8, etc., but ironically not a d20). Encounters (which can be monsters, barriers, allies, treasures) have a target number which you need to beat to successfully navigate. You can play cards from your character's personalized deck and use your inherent special powers to boost your skills, and occasionally your allies can help you. Track down and kill the episode's Villain, usually cutting a swathe through his or her Henchpeople on the way, and you win. After the game, you can rebuild your character's deck using cards you've acquired during the adventure to make him or her more potent next time.

The mechanics of this are simple and nicely done, but not particularly noteworthy. What I think is interesting is looking at how the game approaches the question of how to balance narrative scripting against gameplay variability.

Cooperative games usually need to provide some kind of narrative experience to be successful; they can't just be intellectual puzzles. There are obviously a lot of ways to do this, but the general idea is to give the series of challenges the players must overcome (and rewards they receive for doing so) some sort of structure designed to engage them. This can be entirely narrative, with the challenges having some attached title or flavor text which is read aloud with the story becoming emergent as the texts are read (as long as they are coherent enough that players can improvise logical connections). Or the structure can be much more constructed and explicit, with challenges and rewards designed and ordered to produce an intended overall emotional story arc.

Examples of games which use the first idea are easy to find; successful examples include Robinson Crusoe, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Ghost Stories (or Arkham Horror, Shadows over Camelot, or Defenders of the Realm, if you consider those games good). You have a huge supply of little storylets, which are pulled out more or less randomly and translated into game-mechanics form. A windstorm hits (reducing your shelter level), your lack of Courtly Graces offends the nobility (and you become Scorned), or whatever. As they are read they form a timeline you can create a story out of.

This has the gameplay advantage of making the tasks you are facing varied and unpredictable, and differ greatly from game to game. It also allows the players to do their own storytelling when the events remain within the bounds of the somewhat plausible. The huge disadvantage, as anyone who has a basic understanding of literature or music will tell you, is that we have a pretty good understanding of how compelling narratives are built, and this is most definitely not it. Stories have build-up, carefully managed cycles of tension and resolution, anticipation, and suspense. None of which you can reliably do if you’re just pulling random storylets.

Still, I think there is nothing inherently wrong with this way of doing things. For example, while Nuclear War or Fluxx aren't particular good games by 2014 standards, they do have delightful anti-establishment or satirical aesthetics that are both completely coherent and tied up with their total randomness (and, it bears mentioning, their brevity). Or a game like Once Upon a Time, where the players' attempts to create signal out of noise and find ways to creatively link events is what the game is. So clearly it's possible to do great work this way. But it's also an easy and unfortunate default pattern when a designer is unskilled, or when a game doesn't have a strong creative vision or anything particular to say. If you look at a big and intricate game like Battlestar Galactica, where the fictional world it's designed to emulate has a clear authorial style, it's hard to see the merit in having the players interact with a simple, random, unstructured throughline.

The opposite end of the spectrum is Knizia's highly structured Lord of the Rings. Here, the story events and the challenges associated with them are laid out in a strict order. You're going through Rivendell to Moria to Rohan, and that's all there is to it. You face the same challenges (and narrative elements) in the same order each game. There is this still quite a lot of randomness in the timing of the events and resource flows, as random draws from a bag of tiles trigger various game elements, but the story events that drive the narrative are scripted.

This strong structure gives the gameplay itself the ebb and flow required to make the story engaging. The designer can directly tweak and manage the flow of challenges and rewards to manipulate the moment-to-moment game tension, hopefully giving us both high-tension action scenes and rewarding us with moments of rest and refresh after we get through. This can, when well executed, give us a far more visceral engagement with the game because it goes after our emotions very directly. Pandemic does the same thing: the structured way the decks are manipulated (pre-stacking the player deck, the stacking and re-stacking of the infection deck) alternates high-risk and high-tension periods where you are firefighting crises with lower-risk infrastructure-building and research-gathering periods.

Even though for all these reasons I think of the structured narrative as "the right way" and the random event firehose as "the wrong way", in truth it's a continuum and structure is certainly not an end in and of itself. The goal is to modulate the players’ sense or risk, to feed the dread of anticipation and allow the relief and accomplishment of a challenge faced down, and that requires both a degree of predictability as well as significant risk and therefore uncertainty. Clearly you can go too far in trying to organize your narrative – making the story predictable and boring – just as you can make a game too random and disjointed. It wouldn't be hard to argue that Britannia, for example, is too well-organized and that it needs more uncertainty to maintain tension. My experience though is that cooperative or narrative-driven games almost never err on the side of being too structured.

The interesting thing about Pathfinder is that from the long view it resembles classic, unstructured, firehose-driven games. You have a box containing a very large number of cards that the characters can encounter, and you randomly pull some of them out and deal them into piles at different locations to explore. When you explore, you just draw a card from a location deck and do what it says, with perhaps minor assistance from the other players. The Villain is dealt into one of these piles at random and you just need to plow through the decks to hunt him down. If your goal is hunting the bad guy, there are no percentages in going to the Apothecary before you hit the Treacherous Cave; the Villain is equally likely to be anywhere. It’s eerily similar to Arkham Horror's "go to a location and random stuff happens for no particular reason".

But Pathfinder combines straightforward gameplay with just enough structure to make decision-making and task allocation interesting and have a real but measured sense of risk. Each location has a clearly specified mix of cards that go into the deck: monsters, barriers, weapons, armor, spells, items, and allies. The mix is listed on the top of the location card, where you can always look at it and know what you’re getting in to. So unlike in Arkham Horror, when you go to a location you have a pretty clear idea of what you might get out of it and which character is best suited for the challenges it might present (the Thief for the location with the barriers, the Fighter for the place with the monsters, the Sorcerer for the place with the allies). Still, while the Fighter may be the best person to take on the monsters in the Desecrated Vault, there is still usually the possibility that he’ll run into a barrier or trap that’ll hose him, so there is almost always still some risk. And there are balancing factors; maybe you really need to find a better a weapon, so a trip to the Garrison is worth the risk of facing monsters. More likely, you don’t have a character who is ideally suited to exploring a location, but someone has to do it, so you need to figure out who is going to sign up for the increased risk (because you always have to face the card you draw, teaming up is actually not particularly useful). Additionally, once locations have been cleared of Henchpeople, they need to be “closed”, secured against the Villain’s return. This involves another test, and the character best suited to exploring the location may well not be ideally suited to closing it. Opportunities to close a location are infrequent and valuable and you want someone who is able to do it there when the opportunity presents itself, which is another matter of risk management. This all adds up to a significant amount of nuance and randomness, but because the general contours are spelled out and what needs to be done is clear, it’s interestingly tractable. You always know what you need to do to make forward progress, and you can make judgements about risk and reward that can pay off or not.

However, what this structure doesn’t do is give you any overall sense of pacing or drive. Some locations are more dangerous than others (sometimes significantly so, often not), but the game never modulates its moment-to-moment tension. You’re never forced to run the gauntlet before you want to or go into panic defense mode, nor are you given a moment of respite to recover and gear up after facing something particularly dangerous. Pathfinder's time pressure is just a 30-turn clock you need to beat – an arbitrary, inorganic limit. Compare to Pandemic, with its beautifully organic ebbing and flowing threat and pressure, where you need to win before the diseases do. By comparison, Pathfinder just has a time limit because if it didn’t there would be no game. Given Pathfinder’s source material this is fine, time just isn’t a dimension of traditional D&D stories; for structural reasons D&D-style RPGs in general have a difficult time managing time as a storytelling pressure. But this is a boardgame, not an RPG, and there is no need to be bound by a stricture of the original format.

Interestingly for a game that lacks any kind of strong overarching narrative, Pathfinder eschews any sort of explicit textual elements. Cards have illustrations and more or less descriptive titles but no flavor text. There are no “event” cards which add dramatic twists or change the rules or environment. The only real explanation of what you’re trying to accomplish comes up front, when you select the adventure to go on and get a few perfunctory sentences of flavor on the card that also outlines the locations, Villains, and Henchpeople involved (location cards also have some static descriptions, but they are in practice invisible because they're on the back of the card). This makes the experience somewhat generic. The box says it’s the “Rise of the Runelords Base Set”, with the “Rise of the Runelords” being the long-form adventure arc which wends its way through the base game and 5 expansions. But there is no sense that this is taking place in anything other than just a generic D&D fantasy world. If the premise of the story is that there are Runelords and they are rising, the game doesn’t exactly go out of its way to fill you in on what’s up with that.

What this long arc does capture, though, is very distinctively D&D: the slow, grinding out of improvements to your character and his or her equipment. You wade through monsters and challenges and maybe you’ll find a longsword to replace your short sword. The upgrades to your character and availability of new cards to add your deck are sporadic; after four games, you may have a better weapon or one more spell, or you may have basically the same deck you started with and one minor skill improvement. After you make it all the way through all the adventures your character will have accomplished quite a bit in the end, but that will be a lot of hours of gaming and the rewards for risking death each time out are very incremental. That’s fine, it’s the D&D tradition, but in the context of a boardgame it feels wrong. If this is the route we’re going to go, I’d like more intense pacing. Personally, I’d much rather have multiple, complete 6-episode arcs which have a quick pace and you can play a character through and then move on to the next story with a fresh character. The 36-episode monster arc just seems like a huge time sink. This feels to me like a back-port from MMORPGs, and not really appropriate for a boardgames.

Still, when all is taken into account I do like Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords well enough. The pacing of the long adventure arc is probably too slack to keep me interested for that long, but the individual adventures are playable, quick, simple, and are structured well enough to provide both meaningful decisions and some tension. It’s certainly not in the same league as Robinson Crusoe, Pandemic, or Lord of the Rings, but you can’t play those games all the time and some of them require a significant energy investment while Pathfinder is more lightweight. Besides, D&D is more than a game now, it’s become something of a cultural touchstone. While the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game may not exactly be a work of game design brilliance, it is a workmanlike game that has a huge weight of tradition behind it.

13th Age

I've been fed up with D&D and its many incarnations (basically D&D 2, 3, 3.5, and 4, Pathfinder, and other d20 knock-offs) for some time now. The picayune rules complexity is painful and unwelcome; the generic European medieval fantasy gameworld is bland and uninspiring; its core activity of killing things and taking their stuff is vaguely unsettling; and the constant repetition of the same storytelling tropes has become tiresome. With small-press and indie RPG publishers doing so many interesting things, it's time to move on. My tastes now run much more towards a game like Arcana Evolved, a game based on the D&D 3.5 rules but one where Monte Cooke's wonderfully imaginative and well-realized world, driven by a distinctive creative vision, justified the complexity. Or Robin Law's Ashen Stars, which uses a simple, highly playable and player-driven game system in a terrifically-realized setting. Nonetheless, I was optimistic about 13th Age. The promise of a streamlined game system and higher expectations for player engagement appealed to me, but a d20 game based in a traditional D&D-ish fantasy world makes finding players much easier. Here was the possibility of happy compromise.

If you’ve played D&D4, the rules transition to playing 13th Age is relatively painless (and only somewhat less so, although perhaps a little more fraught, if you’re coming from D&D3 or Pathfinder). Your character sheet will look much simpler, but entirely familiar. You roll d20s for checks. At-Will/Encounter/Daily powers define your character. Healing surges, saving throws, and attacks and defenses are all still there. Combat no longer uses a map grid, but otherwise has a similar feel. D&D4 may have had a variety of issues, but it did good work in terms of filing off needless rules complexity and making D&D a more playable game and less about searching for rules exploits. 13th Age pushes even further in this direction.

Although 13th Age races and classes are defined similarly to D&D4, they are clearly homages to incarnations past. They’re all here: Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, Rogues, Bards, and so on. Barbarians are simple to play, have only a few powers to activate even as they go up levels, and just wade into melee and kick ass and take names. Fighters are more sophisticated and have a variety of combat maneuvers that can trigger on every die roll. Rogues and Wizards reclaim their place as the most intricate classes, requiring both the management of lots of abilities and the creative use of strong but situational powers. Notably, Paladins are both playable and interesting, a first for a fantasy d20 game I believe (I can’t personally speak to Bards). Initially I was pleased to see D&D4's movement towards balanced classes, but I soon realized the fix (giving everything a high degree of symmetry) was as bad as the original problem (the classes no longer felt distinctive). 13th Age gets this right.

So far, this “just” adds up to a more skillfully executed version of D&D. 13th Age brings 3 key new ideas: character backgrounds, icons relationships, and one unique things  (there are some other ideas, including a magic item system that promises more than it delivers, but these are the big ones). Some aspects work better than others, and they all highlight both the potential and the pitfalls of the game.

Backgrounds replace D&D skills. Concrete skills (run, jump, diplomacy, etc.) are gone. Instead, you write backgrounds for your character, which can range from the straightforward to the esoteric: "temple guard", "reformed thief", and "hellhole commando" are some examples from the book. My last character, a dark elf paladin, had "Emissary of the Court of the Stars" and "The Queen's Executioner". If you need to make a skill check, just see if one of your backgrounds applies and use it as a bonus. This is terrific and gives you a lot of interesting leeway to both bring your character to life in a mechanically useful way, and add your creative voice to the setting (who knew the Elf Queen used elite assassins?). More games should do this.

Replacing the bizarre pantheon of D&D deities, 13 Age gives us 13 Icons – the mortal but incredibly powerful movers and shakers of the 13th Age world. Some of these are cool and add depth to the setting: The Archmage, The Crusader, The Great Gold Wyrm, and The Three. Some of them are startlingly generic: just the names of The Dwarf King, The Elf Queen, The High Druid, and The Orc Lord tell you most of what there is. All characters start with relationships with a couple of them, either positive, negative, or ambiguous. You roll a die for each of your relationship points at the start of a session, and 5s and 6s create “story hooks” which bring that relationship into that evening’s play. I like this is theory, but unless you’re playing in an extremely improvisational style, in practice it is at best a bit awkward. The throughline of 13th Age is still largely about killing things and taking their stuff, so GMs are going to spec out combat scenes (much easier than any version of D&D, but still some work) and work out the general adventure flow, so these relationship rolls serve mainly to provide riffing possibilities or flavor. Which is OK but not spectacularly interesting, and they also have a big risk: they can significantly damage party cohesion. If one player has picked the Crusader and the GM uses one of her relationship rolls as the hook for the adventure, how does she convince another player whose relationships are with the Elf Queen and the High Druid to come along? These icons have rather different agendas. 13th Age provides no inherent glue to keep parties with relationships to different Icons from coming apart. The first thing you need to figure out as a GM is how you keep your players together and focussed. These relationship rolls are sufficiently awkward that I suspect many GMs will end up looking at their players’ icon relationships and just regard them as story requests, and ignore the die-roll mechanics associated with them.

Lastly, the One Unique Thing is the simplest but also the most interesting aspect of your character. Usually just one short sentence, it describes what makes your character different from everyone else. The rules and examples give you significant leeway in interpreting just what “unique” means; you can go with “unique in the party” or “unique in the entire game world”. Some of the examples from the book are pretty mundane (“I am a former cultist”? Really?), and my preference is to be aggressive about making your uniques interesting and truly unique (my paladin’s was “I am the only elf who can withdraw from the mystical Elven dream consciousness”). Low-level D&D characters have always had the problem that they are generally incompetent and unremarkable stereotypes. Giving them a unique thing means everyone has a sense of destiny, even at low level (never fear, your one unique thing doesn’t have to be an accident of birth or ancestry, it could also be something earned or experienced prior to the start of play). One way to think about a unique thing is that it can be intriguing but non-specific – perhaps a question you don’t know the answer to that the GM can use as a hook to play off. But, it doesn’t have to say anything about the future; it could be something memorable that you did in the past that can give your character depth. To me, the best ones are the ones that say something about both your character and the world. The game itself doesn’t give what I would consider firm guidance on this though, it gives you a few soft suggestions and lets you figure out how you want to use them.

This I think is an example of where 13th Age, for all its many virtues, falls short because it hedges. It doesn’t have its own  premise, its own reason for existence, or if it does it doesn’t go all in. If you pick up Numenéra or Night’s Black Agents, those games are in no doubt about what they are trying to do creatively, and deliver what they promise. 13th Age is instead relying on you to tap into your long history of playing D&D and D&D-like games to bring along the elements of D&D that you like and meld them with the ideas in 13th Age. In terms of tapping into the largest available market of gamers, this is obviously great. In terms of presenting a game with a clear creative vision of its own that might compel you to play it, not so much. This wishy-washiness of how to play the game’s simplest, most important core idea – the uniques – is one way this plays out, but there are other important ways too. The gazetteer of the world is less than 20 pages long (counting art) and consists mostly of tropes and vague descriptions, and is too high level to be of much use once you get down to brass tacks and try to set actual adventures in actual locations. Only a few of the Icons have more than a column of useful text attached to them, while many – The Elf Queen, The Dwarf King – have perhaps two meaningful sentences of description, far too little for them to be useful as anything more than an access point to your repository of bad fantasy tropes regarding Elven Queens or Dwarven Kings (dwarves never being rules by queens, and elves only rarely by kings).

That might be fine, but let’s be honest here, these tropes are boring, predictable, and generally suck. It’s not enough to just do D&D with a better rules set that is more about creative play and less about creative rules exploits. I want to care about the world I’m playing in, to be part of the group not just because they needed a cleric and my character was available at the time.

So I find myself conflicted about 13th Age. The game design is great and is mechanically by far my favorite in the “kill monsters and take their stuff” genre. Not a high bar admittedly, but still! I love the backgrounds and the One Unique Things. I am less enamored of the fact that the gamemaster has to do so much heavy lifting to make the game work: flesh out the details of all the lightly-detailed icons and figure out what they are up to in her world; fill out the too-sparse bestiary; figure out some way to make sure the party is coherent; not just police the inevitable “awesome at everything” backgrounds and “I’m the only person who can fire at-will 10d6 fireballs from my eyes” uniques, but fill in all the guidance that the book lacks on how to corral players and the GM into a coherent campaign style that will produce interesting and useful uniques. Giving players freedom is great, but in order to be productive, that freedom requires constraints. Specifically, it requires the constraints of a setting. 13th Age seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be innovative and give players agency and all that, but it doesn’t want to scare off D&D and Pathfinder players by putting a stake in the ground. So it waffles. There is nothing more deadly to a creative enterprise than waffling.

For a sense of comparison, I’ve run both 13th Age and Ashen Stars recently. By virtue of Ashen Stars’ clear premise, strong setting, and clean system, I was able to put together my first story arc and successfully run it with less than an hour of prep time. By contrast, prepping an adventure for 13th Age was a time sink because so much world creation still needs to be done – fleshing out and determining the motives of the icons, figuring out their organizations, building cities, working with players’ varying and sometimes conflicting uniques, and so on. Because 13th Age lacks a Premise, the resulting chaos demands to be sorted.

I have nonetheless enjoyed playing 13th Age as a mild rebuke to the overwrought D&D tradition. The game system is elegant and does reward player creativity. It's easy to get into and lively. But for me, the bad fantasy genre of D&D-style roleplaying that 13th Age is channeling is not really in my blood, so 13th Age needed to do more than just show up and look cool to win me over. It fills a niche, and it’s a game I’ll probably enjoy playing from time to time, but for where I am in my roleplaying career it’s still not the answer. 

LOKA

I have never cared much for Chess, but I've always been intrigued by various chess variants. One of the most interesting was Shuuro, designed by Alesso Cavatore (who I knew through the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, which I enjoyed until RSI sunk that hobby for me). Shurro is Chess played on a large, 12x12 board with armies you design yourself using a point-buy system. I found it intriguing because the large number of pieces and large amount of space involved tended to move the game more in the direction of a strategic, creative game than a purely tactical one – at least, when played by players of comparatively low pure chess skill.

The drawback of Shuuro (and its companion 4-player expansion Turanga) was that it ultimately didn't quite move the ball far enough away from the Chess aesthetic to rope in players like me. It's still a pretty ruthlessly analytical look-ahead game where seemingly minor overlooked branches in the search tree can have catastrophic results. Also, with more pieces and more space it can take a while to play. Even so, Shuuro is one of the few no-luck pure abstracts that I like, although I would still generally play any of the GIPF series games by preference.


Enter LOKA, the next logical step along this path of making Chess for people who don't like Chess. Again, we're playing with regular chess pieces on a regular square grid, but LOKA embraces Turanga's 4-player, 2-team game as the standard mode of play, with teams starting on opposite sides and needing to capture the kings of both opponents to win. Again, you're buying your pieces using points, and you can adjust the feel and intensity of your games by choosing how many points players get.* You put out a few random terrain pieces to mix things up a little bit. And, did I mention, you use dice to resolve capture attempts.

When you try to capture an opponent's piece, both players roll a die. You start with a d4 and get "boosts" to larger die sizes (d4 -> d8 -> d12 -> d20) based on the situation: being the attacker, being a better piece, or (most crucially) having other attacking pieces threatening the target piece, or other defending pieces covering it. Also crucially, these additional threats or defenders can be either yours or your partner's. High die roller wins, capturing the opponent's piece. In case of ties defender wins, unless it was double 1's, in which case both pieces are removed.

From these simple and elegant ideas, a fascinating game that completely upends Chess emerges. No longer is the primary heavy lifting of deciding on a move done through lengthy analysis of move and counter-move. Instead, a big factor becomes judgements about risk and at how far to push your luck. Because capturing is not a sure thing anymore, decisive threats take a little bit longer to develop as you and your partner need to coordinate to build it up. As a consequence, you find yourself asking: do I like the odds of that capture attempt? Is now the time to do it? Do I need to martial more forces? Similarly for the defender, you ask: am I better off reinforcing this piece, getting out of the way, or standing fast and developing my own threat elsewhere? What is my tolerance for risk?

The probabilities involved here are interesting. Even the most extreme cases (d20 attacking d4, d6 attacking d20) have a roughly 12% chance of backfiring/breaking your way. In practice, setting up monster d20 attacks is extremely difficult, so you're looking at the middle of the range, d8s and d12s vs. d6s or d8s for developed attacks. You need to decide whether the risks are worth the rewards, and those risks cannot be shrugged off. You need to set up good risks (either favorable attacks in terms of piece exchange or position, or attacks where you risk a lot less of either than your opponent does) and avoid bad ones. Taking a pawn just because you can is all of a sudden unappealing; that 10-20% or more downside risk of any capture attempt means if you're going to roll the dice, you have to have significant upside. You need to focus on things of immediate value, not things 6 moves downstream which have no chance to play out.

If that were it, it still might not be enough (the game includes rules and a board for playing 2-player, but I haven't tried it and don't have much desire to). Capture probabilities would be just something else to factor into your position analysis. What makes LOKA sing for me is combining this with the fact that LOKA is a team game. Because now your partner can very directly provide support to your attacks and defenses, you get a very interesting game of tempo and coordination (much moreso than Turanga, which was closer to straight Chess). You can move to support your partners' threats, or assist in defense to allow her to continue to press an advantage. You'll generally want to try to bring you and your partner's combined weight against one opponent while holding off the other. So it becomes a question of tempo. In theory, you and your partner can get two moves for every one of a single opponent. Obviously, your opponents will be trying to do the same thing to you, so the extent to which you can work together to achieve advantage is crucial. As in Ingenious (Einfach Genial), in-game communication is illegal so you have to do your best to understand and anticipate, to try to signal without sacrificing advantage – all while trying to keep your options open so you can shift one way or the other to take advantage of opportunity.

I found all these interplays totally fascinating, so I really enjoyed LOKA. It helps that Mantic has done a great job with the presentation of the game, colorful and with nice models for the various pieces that are both flavorful and readily identifiable as their corresponding chess pieces, once you understand the design.

One key to LOKA, as in so many games, is that it has to be played in a reasonable amount of time – or at least, an amount of time everyone at the table is comfortable with. Probabilities in LOKA are fairly coarse – most attacks will have chances of success between 60% and 80% in increments of 10% or 15% – so it is obviously a game with significant luck. LOKA is certainly part tactical game and you need to do Chess-like lookahead, but the probabilities make deep analysis unrewarding. It's a game about managing fairly clear risks and threats. However, the game does look a lot like Chess – it's Chess pieces and a chess board, despite the nice fantasy design – and so it's easy to default to traditional Chess deep tree analysis. But, with a sparse board in the 160 point game and threats from your neighbors developing diagonally, you do need to be careful of long-ranging bishops which can surprise you if your Chess experience has you focusing on the center of the board. So, while you do need to break some Chess habits, there is still analysis to be done. It's a tricky balance to strike when figuring out how to best use your time. It's also of course a 4-player game, so downtime can factor in. In general, my feeling is that while a considered pace is fine, it does need to keep moving. I'm not generally a fan of timers in games, but this might be the exception to ensure a play time everyone is comfortable with (and there are some nice ones now like the DGT Pyramid Game Timer – the colors even match). For me, a little time management pressure heightens the excitement and keeps the game moving. Not everyone will agree.

If you have even just a passing dislike for Chess, check out LOKA. The degree to which it's built a game almost completely unlike Chess on top of Chess' basic mechanics is worth seeing in and of itself. As a game of tactics, risk, and teamwork it's unusual, unexpected, and quite engrossing. It's one of my favorites from 2013.

---

* Well, sort of. The base box easily supports 160 points or so, with a few choices about army composition (primarily, to buy a queen or not). If you want to field larger forces, you'll probably need to buy the expansion boxes. The 160 point game is great on its own, it has a spare elegance and plays quickly, but if do enjoy the game you'll almost certainly want to try larger games (you can play 250 points with the base set, but it involves just using all the pieces). I do wish a few more pieces had been included in the base set.

Postscript: As a fan of Shuuro and Alesso Cavatore, I backed LOKA on Kickstarter so I got some extra goodies. These worked out nicely in that they add some variety to the game but are more quirky than than really useful additions. The new terrain tiles take the game in a direction I'm not sure it really wants to go (a theme is terrain where pieces can take a chance to power up instead of moving). The new models are cool but the point costs are high and how do you decide who gets to use them? The action card decks are fun (and somewhat different for each faction) but add even more chaos and uncertainty to the game, which I'm not sure is what it really wants. Anyway, these are fun add-ons for backers but not in any way essential or even desirable additions to the game's overall creative vision.

Lost Legends

Reactions to Lost Legends, Mike Elliot's latest attempt to repurpose an existing game (7 Wonders) as a dungeon-crawler, have been all over the map around here. One player thought it was the greatest game ever. Another called it broken. I think it's clearly neither of those things, but where it lies on the spectrum isn't immediately obvious. Like many of Elliot's games, it's conceptually terrific but can also feel precarious at times. Regardless, I quite like it.

Lost Legends is doing for 7 Wonders exactly the same thing that Thunderstone did for Dominion, bringing an abstract game to life by simultaneously melding it with D&D dungeon-crawling tropes and giving the gameplay more subtlety. 7 Wonders is a game I enjoyed for being good for large numbers of players and playing quickly and smoothly, before its obvious problems ran it down: too much front-loading and railroading, a needlessly complex proliferation of scoring mechanisms, and too little opportunity for players to play creatively or do interesting things. And despite all the nice art, it's really just a color-matching game without much, if anything, to say. By contrast, Lost Legends is an actual game design and not just a well-engineered arrangement of clever mechanical bits.

As everyone who has had even a passing encounter with D&D knows, if you're going to go into a dungeon and kill creatures and take their stuff, you need the right gear. Your trusty sword and shield and and the righteousness of your cause are not going to cut it. You need healing potions, the latest and greatest magical weaponry, magic armor, a cold iron sword if you think you might run into demons, some holy water and a flask or two of oil to throw at things, a wand of fireballs, a 10 foot pole, and so on (D&D is a game that is in no small part about shopping). After preparing yourself for contingencies ranging from the plausible to the outlandish, depending on your budget and sense of paranoia, you brave the dungeon and see what's actually down there and whether or not you can kill it to raise the cash to continue to feed the shopping frenzy.

Lost Legends nicely captures this American spirit of toolsy acquisitiveness. Your character is going to need equipment to succeed in the dungeon, but you only have so much cash, and there are a lot of things to be bought. Weapons come in three flavors (melee, ranged, and magic), and many monsters are resistant to one or more of them. Your character is also fragile, so you'll want some armor and healing. Or maybe you'd prefer to go a more all-out offense route, amassing  powerful spells and a big weapon to knock out your adversaries before they have a chance to strike you and hope you don't run into anything that your spells can't handle. The key, as is so often the case in good games of this sort, is in balance and managing risk. If you're going to skimp on defense, you want to make sure your offense is really strong and robust against a variety of creatures. Stronger defense lowers your risk of getting killed, but at the end of the day the game is about killing monsters and taking their stuff, not staying alive (as in D&D, "dead" is a condition that is just slightly more costly to remove than "severely wounded").

Having the right tools is the most important thing, but having skills does help also. Each character starts with two different skills, which make matching weapons more effective and give discounts against matching classes of cards. The dwarf will both pay less for the longsword, and be able to do more damage with it. However, additional skills can be fairly easily acquired, and these initial paths serve more as suggestions than strong strategic biases. Lost Legends finds a nice spot here too, with player positions being initially differentiated  enough to give everyone an initial shove in a different direction, but not so much that players are just pursuing their own unique path.

Once you've geared up and are ready to start killing monsters, we head to the dungeon. Mechanically, the process of killing monsters and scoring points for them is a bit creakier than the elegant and powerful drafting game. Players are dealt monsters from a deck which they have to individually fight, but if members of the party (i.e., other players) are unengaged because they have vanquished their opponents you can pass your monsters off to them, primarily if you can't handle their resistances or the damage they deal. Monsters come in four different classes (dragons, undead, animals, and humanoids) and you get points for getting 2 or 3 of a kind or one of each, plus another bonus for getting the most of a given kind. You also get experience points for killing anything, which will both improve your character stats (health and mana pool) and ultimately give you points if you get enough of them. There are rules for how you get new monsters, monsters that charge, passing monsters, trophies, and so on, that aren't complicated but are also not intuitive. They get the job done – they give you some control over which monsters you face while often forcing you to deal with whatever you get, add some risk to drawing blind, and make the choices about equipment pay off – but it's hard not to believe they couldn't have been done more cleanly.

Still, the combat does work in two key ways. Firstly, of course, it justifies all the drafting you just did. Choices about specialization vs. flexibility and power vs. defense will pay off (or not). The tactical game of when to deploy the single-use items in your arsenal is not deep, but there is enough there to engage. Secondly, Lost Legends has wisely discarded the tropes of D&D adventuring. In both classic and modern D&D, you have lots of combat designed to wear the party down rather than be an actual threat to their imaginary lives. Lost Legends gives you actual dangerous adversaries. Unwise drafting will, in fact, get you killed. Since Lost Legends is – as it should be – a game of risk, even good drafting will occasionally get you killed – as it should. Getting killed is not the end of the world, but is definitely an inconvenience and while you can still do well, it'll be very hard to come back to actually win unless it was a TPK (rare, but not impossible) or you got killed on the way out the door. In line with this, the game is only about an hour.

I liked Lost Legends. It has real stakes – draft well and you'll win, draft poorly and your character will get killed. It has a sense of risk – you do the best you can during drafting, but dungeon delving has occupational hazards and you can't mitigate them all. It separates the winners from the losers – while 7 Wonders will see scores separated by a point or two, Lost Legends spreads of 50-75% are not uncommon, and while sometimes this will be genuinely bad luck, usually it's much more about risks taken and gone bad or failing to achieve a good balance with your character's equipment. It gives you lots of interesting choices and the opportunity to try creative equipment mixes. Lost Legends certainly won't be for everyone, but if you have even a passing desire to kill some monsters and take their stuff, or wanted to like 7 Wonders but wished it had been better, you should check it out.

Tzolk'in

I've been wanting to write something about Tzolk'in for quite some time. It's a game I had to be convinced to even try – my experience with CGE has been mixed, and the gears struck me as a gimmick. When I finally got around to trying it though, I liked it a lot and it's almost cracked 10 plays.

I've still been a bit conflicted, because the game has always seemed a bit vacuous.  These days I tend to prefer games with thematic focus. Tzolk'in's physical presentation is very cool, and both the art and the gears use authentic Mayan imagery. Somebody obviously did some research. It's just not clear whether this is all just flash, or if it informs the actual game systems in any way.

The subtitle of the game is "The Mayan Calendar", and Tzolk'in appropriately does seem to revolve around time and tempo. The goal is to score lots of points, which you do by gaining the favor of the gods, installing crystal skulls in Chichen Itza, and building buildings. The resources you'll use to do these things are wood, stone, gold, and food. Acquiring those resources and then turning them into points involves making efficient use of your workers, who you will commit to various tasks for various lengths of time.

Tzolk'in looks a bit like a worker-placement game, because there are workers and you place them. But it's not, at least not in the traditional sense. Here, you have 5 different cities you can assign workers to, each of which specializes in a different task (Palenque does farming, Yaxchiclan resource gathering, Tikal building & technology, Uxmal trading, and Chichen Itza crystal skull mounting). Each turn you must either place one or more workers onto the cities' starting spots on the moving gears, or remove one or more workers and do the action for the space they have advanced to. After everyone has taken a turn the big central gear rotates, driving all the other city gears and advancing all the workers on them by one spot. Crucially, you can't pass. If all your workers are on the board, you have to activate one or more of them. If none of your workers are on the board, you have to place one or more. Placing more than one worker has an increasing cost in food, the currency of the game. You can never be blocked from placing a worker in a city, but if someone else is already there you have to pay more food to get in (although you'll start on an already-advanced spot).

So, it's a game about timing. At some of the cities (resources, food, and skull-mounting), staying on the track longer is usually better, so you'd prefer to keep your worker riding for as long as possible. There are enough exceptions to the general rule that it's not really a rule – for example, some spaces are forests that need to be cleared (for wood) before they can be farmed (for food), and some technology makes early spaces very efficient – but it holds generally. Other tracks are not as straightforward. On the building & technology track, you might want either building, or technology, and those spaces are disjoint and spread out across the dial. The trade track is a true grab brag, with a focus on the third spot which gives you another worker. It all rewards planning. When you jump on a track, you'll want to know what you plan to get out of it (say, you need at least 4 corn, or the space with two technology advances). But you also want to be able to be flexible, letting a worker ride if an opportunity arises. Fortunately, you can always take an action you've already passed by (for a cost in food), so it doesn't always require extreme precision.

Less obviously from this description, but more crucial in practice, is that the requirement to always either place or activate a worker makes it important to find a rhythm. Most of the time you want as many of your workers as possible riding the gears, moving towards better action spots. Maybe you'll want one or two workers on long-term tasks, while the rest cycle on and off of shorter-duration ones. As long as you can keep productively placing and removing workers a few at a time, your costs stay low and you're getting a good number of advances every time the gears rotate. As soon as you have to activate or place larger numbers of workers, you take a hit: 4 workers are extremely expensive to place all in one go, and even 3 aren't cheap, but workers off the board aren't working. You want to maximize the amount of time your workers are being productive. My first few games I won comfortably by simply focusing on efficiently keeping my workers working cheaply and not worrying too much about where the points were ultimately going to come from.

Tzolk'in is a no-randomness, 100% open-information game and this juggling act is obviously a bit complicated.  Also, it's a CGE game, so the rules are somewhat involved – lots of different action spaces, different buildings, technology advantages, temple tracks with different payoffs, and so on. You could easily imagine this bogging down into total analysis paralysis as Dungeon Lords or Shipyard so easily can. But while it's unquestionably a detailed and thinky game, the gears don't seem to lock up, or at least not as much as you might guess. I think it's because you operate with a lot of constraints – you'll never have enough workers or enough food to do what you really want to do. If you're short food, which you often will be, there is nothing for it but to go to Palenque. With only 5 spots to put workers, the game focusses on giving you a limited number of highly distinct, high-leverage actions and there is very little of the micromanagement that so often weighs games down.

The big scoring opportunities in the game come from 3 major sources: Monuments you can build, which provide familiar endgame bonuses for having done a range of things during the game (advanced tech tracks, built specific kinds of buildings, farmed, and so on); getting Crystal Skulls and placing them in Chichen Itza; advancing in the temples; and to lesser extent, building buildings. Temple advancement is fairly diffuse and there are opportunities to do this, usually at the cost of resources, on all three of the non-resource-gathering gears. Advances on the temple tracks also feed back and give you resource bonuses twice a game. Crystal Skulls are the most focussed: there is exactly one spot on the resource gear that gives you a Skull and only a Skull, and these are useful only for mounting in Chichen Itza, which gives you points and a bump in one of the temples (and Chichen Itza does nothing else). The rest of the resources are quite flexible, being used for buildings, monuments, buying technology (which makes action spaces more productive), sacrificing to the gods, and selling for food. The net effect feels fairly well-balanced. There aren't any strategic cul-de-sacs, it's easy to feel like you're making progress, and scores will tend to be close. Unlike a lot of 100% open-information, no-luck games, this is not a game designed to make you feel like an idiot.

Even though Tzolk'in plays smoothly and feels pretty elegant once you get into the groove, there are still a fair number of details here and it's moderately tedious to have to explain the game to new players (I haven't even mentioned a fair amount of detail). So the question inevitably arises: what is it all in service of? That's the question that nags at me.

I think the answer is, it's in service of itself. Tzolk'in is thematic in the same way that Ra is thematic. Ra is an auction game with nice art and nods to the familiar Egyptian tropes: floods, pyramids, gods with funny heads, and so on. Tzolk'in is a game about scheduling and timing with nice art and nods to less-familiar Mayan tropes: calendars, corn, step pyramids, even their (as postulated by Jared Diamond) deforestation problem. Does Tzolk'in grab on to anything fundamental about Mayans, their calendar, or their civilization? Not really, and I guess my instinct is that for a game of its complexity, it should.

Ultimately I think my instincts are wrong in this case, though. Tzolk'in is a very playable, engaging, meaty euro that gives you lots of planning and resource optimization opportunities without many of the hazards that usually come with this class of games: systemic imbalance, reliance on brute-force analysis, downtime, effective player elimination. Worker placement games can be especially problematic, since they rely on figuring out how "hot" various action spaces are which requires you figure out not only what each space is worth to you, but what it is worth to every other player. This contention for spaces is a very limited element in Tzolk'in, and you virtually never have to do this sort of analytical heavy lifting. Another nice feature is that Tzolk'in is only minimally about infrastructure development, so early choices don't weigh particularly heavily and it's about making good choices for the whole game. Tzolk'in feels tight, moves at a good pace, and while it presents you with interesting tactical and strategic choices, it doesn't require or reward excessive forward-looking analysis at the expense of strategic judgement.

Tzok'in is definitely quite different in texture from the first generation of euros – it's not as mechanically tight, has a much broader canvas of options, and is quite complicated by 1995-2005 standards. However, the core elements do feel a lot like these classics: focussed, with tight pacing, good balance, and nicely presented. Because I found the gear gimmick distracting, it took me a little bit to understand that was what Tzolk'in was. Once I figured it out, I quite enjoyed it.