City of Oh God!

BoardGameGeek may be a highly regarded internet resource for gamers, but I've seen compelling commentary that argues its users rate with a bias toward complex games. I recently got a firsthand example of it playing Teotihuacan: City of Gods.

Teotihuacan is a game I was excited for, as it comes from designer Daniele Tascini, who created one of the best of this decade in Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar. Teotihuacan was a return to the Mesoamerican theme, and even brought back one side mechanic from Tzolk'in. But otherwise, it was an entirely new design I was really interested to check out. Our first play was pretty rocky, marred by a small but critical misunderstanding of a rule, plus a bunch of procedural hiccups. Figuring we'd worked the kinks out, we played again on a later occasion... only to confirm this game is no Tzolk'in.

The main mechanic of the game involves players using dice without ever rolling them. Instead, dice are the player's pieces, moving clockwise around the board to land on eight different action spaces. After executing an action, you increment the value of the die upward by one. Most actions work better the higher the die value you have. They also work better for having more of your dice in one space -- though you must take the value of the lowest die in the group into account. Going where other players have dice carries a price -- you must pay 1 unit of the game's currency for each player (including yourself) already on an action space you choose. But you can build currency by skipping your action when you land somewhere, taking 1 for each player (including yourself) already there (plus one).

Somewhere in the core of that is an interesting system for an action game -- slightly different from others I've encountered, but still fundamentally familiar. But unfortunately, also in there is just the first example of what makes Teotihuacan tough to play: it's nearly impossible to take your complete turn without forgetting to do something. You'd be surprised how often, after actually doing the action you selected, you forget to raise the value of your die by 1. You'd think, "oh, well then maybe I should raise the value first, then do the action" -- but that just makes for confusion. First, you're supposed to take your action according to the value when your die lands, not after it increments. And even if you can straighten that out, you'll wind up asking yourself (after executing a particularly complex action) "wait, did I already promote this die or not."

Then you start to pile on the other mechanics. Whenever a die reaches value 6, you reset it to 1, move it to the start space of the board, and take one of five possible rewards. You then also increment a round marker, which has to be moved at the end of the last player's turn each round -- plus whenever this "ascension" to die value 6 happens (thereby shortcutting one turn off the game). Then there's the pyramid you have to build, with its spatially challenging symbol-matching and a separate progress track. There are the tokens you can use to decorate the steps of the pyramid. There's the strange housing mechanic that looks strong early, but has fizzled out both times we played for the players who focused too heavily on it. There's a set collection mechanic involving tiles scattered around the board. There are influence tracks for three different gods (the mechanic loosely taken from Tzolk'in). There's the "technologies" space that grants you bonuses for taking other actions around the board -- if you remember to use bonuses. There's a whole mechanic about locking dice on exclusive action spaces within the spaces.

Have your eyes glazed over? Mine did. I mean seriously -- take a look at the game board! I would say it takes as long to explain the rules of this game as it does to play it... but that would be a false claim, as the decision making is so complex on your turn. As long as the explanation takes, it takes even longer to play it. And part of the reason it takes so long to play is that it's nearly impossible to remember everything you have to do on your turn. You took the pyramid building action? Great! So because you matched a red symbol, did you remember to step up on the red god track? How about the pyramid construction track? Did you use your building bonus from the technology track? Did you promote your die? Ooo, you ascended to 6, so which bonus do you want to take? Through more than one game, and dozens of turns in each, we never managed to get very good at tracking it all. On all but the simplest of turns, it seemed inevitable that you'd forget something -- it was only a question of how much later you'd realize it, and whether you could or should catch up later on whenever you did.

It also feels as though understanding this sprawling system even 1% better leads to a 50% gap in the scores. A player can easily run out to a lead that's difficult to catch... and the length of the game makes that a particularly unenjoyable state for all involved. The scoring over the game's three overarcing phases actually decreases instead of escalating. This makes early points especially important, and makes it extra hard to close the gap in the final turns.

Yet for all these rather substantial flaws (in my view), Teotihuacan has cracked the Top 100 Games on BoardGameGeek. And this would seem to be because it has a complexity rating approach 4 out of 5 (which is about as high as games ever get, since it's an averaged rating). Even accepting a bias toward complex games, I really don't understand rallying so much around this particular game.

I wanted to like Teotihuacan very much. I even suspect that if you sweat about half the mechanisms and rules out of it, there would indeed be an excellent game in there somewhere. But as it stands, I simply can't imagine ever playing it when Tzolk'in is available as an alternative. Perhaps another game will put this "incrementing dice as worker placement" system to better use, thereby truly removing the one comeplling reason to consider playing it. Regrettably, I give Teotihuacan a C-. It's simply too much game.