T-Games are back!

The newest heavy T-game, 🏯 Tianxia,  is here from Board & Dice , and it transports us back to ancient China, to the Warring States period. This theme also lends itself well to building walls and defending against invading Nomads, so the game also has some semi-coop tower defense aspect.

Tianxia is a worker placement game, and even though you see lots of meeples all around the board, your workers are actually 3 discs. The meeples themselves will specialize into different roles and basically act as an additional resource you need to manage.

On most turns you place your disc at a region, go up the Palace track that is associated with that region, then depending on where you went you could:
📃Appoint a Governor next to a building to gain its unique effects
⛵Trade with ships in the ports.
💱Exchange resources for goods.
🏯On the defense section you can use resources to train soldiers or build walls.

🛶 Alternatively you can send meeples to barges to gain ever-important resources which doesn't need an action disc - but is still limited by the coins you have to pay.

💬The structure of the game is relatively simple, but I have to say it is still quite heavy, or at least it needs a lot of concentration to avoid missing smaller steps of turns. One of the biggest strengths of Tianxia is the variability of the setup. Thanks to different buildings that you can utilize with your Governors, different player board abilities, and diverse objectives and tokens on the board, the replayability is superb. It also looks very nice on the table, though the board leans a bit towards being too-big (and in spite of this, some of the tracks and trackers are tiny). I also really like the cardboard tokens like the buildings, or the ships you can trade with - many have unique and thematic shapes. 😉