Door 17
Ah, rondels… 🥰 Lately this has become our favorite mechanic, so this of course has to be part of the MechanXmas celebration! So door #17 is about rondels!
⚙️Rondels are circular tracks - basically without a beginning or an end - on which you move some kind of tokens. It always includes some kind of movement restriction rules, like a fix amount or direction you must go in. What I love about them, is that your current position strongly influences what options you have, so often you don’t just have to think of the best action for the current turn, but plan for turns in advance. 🧐 Add to this some additional things like having to pay extra if other tokens are already on a space, and you have got yourself a real nice brainburner of a game. Let us show you some of our favorite rondel games! 😊
In Teotihuacan the board is split into 8 actions boards that are connected in a circle. You move dice workers around to activate actions. A clever twist is how the effectiveness of the actions are decided by how many and what value dice you have there. You also have to pay for dice that are already there so you are always looking for good opportunities.
In Viscounts of the West Kingdom the amount you can move your worker is decided by the card you chose for that turn. You can pay for more moves but can never go less. To have some flexibility though you could snake between the outer and inner paths, then depending on where you land you have different actions available.
Sabika is the newest hit, having 3 interrelated rondels with different types of workers moving on them. Here you also have to pay for other workers already on spots, which strongly restricts what you can do. This makes timing of workers very important too.
In Iki you are running around town activating shops and cards. In this game you have to choose how much you will move in the first phase. Depending on turn order you could get stuck with a worse value. You can move more with sandal tokens but never less. A twist here is that finishing a full circle gets you income, so it might be worth it to move a lot each turn.
