Measoamerican eurogame

Do you like mesoamerican themed games? We love them! One of our recent Kickstarter arrivals is one with such a theme: Ahau - Rulers of Yucatan! It’s a euro game but unlike many others. ☝️ It has some unusually interwoven mechanics, so let start with the basics of how it plays! 🧐

Depending on player count, the game board is split up into 5 or 6 regions. On the edge of the regions are hexagonal cities 🏘️, that all correspond to one of 5 gods. A round begins with secretly playing 2 cards: the first will show which region you want to visit, and the second is combat strength - there is a conflict in case multiple people go to the same region, the loser has to relocate. Then, players pick a pyramid tile from the board and do their turn region order.

First you have to put a worker into a city next to your region, then you can optionally summon the god of the city. 🧞 All the gods have different powers, and the more pyramid tiles of the god you discard or have built into your pyramid, the stronger the effect. Afterwards you choose to either Produce or Build. 👉 Both scale with the amount of workers you already have in place, so populating the board with meeples is a very strategic element. Production gives you resources, building allows you to either put pyramid tiles into your pyramid or construct building tiles that have ongoing abilities.

Each round you discard your played cards, so your options get constrained until you get back your 6 cards. I always like action selection like this. 👍 You could also try to guess where people are going to actively block them 😈, so remembering people’s played cards is useful.

As production sites are depleted, they go on the calendar track - when it’s filled up, you do a K’atun celebration, aka. interim scoring. After 3 of these scoring rounds the game is over and you see who has gathered the most fame! 🏆

💬 The game requires complex thinking, as many of its mechanics are a bit unusual - which could be a pro or a con depending on your preferences. We struggled a bit in our first game to find our way to gather more points.
I definitely want to share more impressions in a follow up post, as there is a lot to unpack.