Crafting an emperor’s legacy

🧧 Terracotta Army was the first game we bought at Gen Con - Board&Dice releases are usually a safe bet. We enjoyed our play very much! 🥰 You play as craftsmen and artists constructing statues out of clay to fill the emperor’s tomb with an army of soldiers.

The game is played over 5 rounds. Each round you are placing workers until you have no more, then there is a short scoring and cleanup phase. 🧐 The worker placement has an exciting element to it: the action wheel is made up of 3 circles - before your placement you can pay coins to rotate the inner or middle circle, then activate the 3 actions of the spot. As others rotate the wheels too, possible actions might change at any time. Meeples block each other, but you can unlock artisan meeples that are more versatile.

The main goal of the game is to place statues into the mausoleum. Which type of warrior you place and where you place them is a multi-layered decision. 🕵 You get points just for placing, but also in each scoring phase and in end-game scoring.

Due to these layers I found that it works well in a 2p game too. 🙃 There are 2 instructor pawns that can be moved with some actions. They check a row and a column for majority and presence each round. There are also 4 specialist statues - e.g. the footman has majority scoring around it, the musician gives out points each round for statues in the same row or column. At the end, statue groups of the same type are scored. Don't forget the 5 randomized round-end objectives either!

There are only two resources - coins and clay - but they are not always easy to come by and you need a lot of them. Also, unused clay will dry out at the end of the round, which then will have to be re-wetted with an action.

The basic flow of the game and the actions themselves are easy to understand, but there are 12 action spots and you can spin the wheels to change things, so we had some analysis paralysis moments. 🙉 The same goes for the placement of statues. That could get better with repeated plays though.

Anyway we like the game very much and it looks awesome as the mausoleum is filled up with miniatures. 🤩