Throw your meeples

In 🦜 Quetzal you play as adventurers and archeologists who have just discovered the City of Sacred Birds. You have 5 days to unearth valuable objects, collect victory points and be the best. It is a light-weight worker placement game with a set collection element. The aesthetics of this game are absolutely bonkers. I love all the colors and illustrations, be it on the box, the board or the cards. 🤩 Only slight problem are how some of the meeple look, but it’s okay. 😅

👌The game has a novel idea: your meeples are double sided - at the start of a round you all roll your meeples as if they were dice. If they land on their white sides they are considered archeologists, on their black side they are adventurers. If they land on their feet or sides you decide how to deploy them, plus you get an additional coin. Depending on the color they will be able to visit different worker placement spots.

👉The worker placement element also has some twists. There are spots that can be visited by anyone, there are sites that only a single worker can visit - here usually the spots on the top cost more coins, but you are allowed to choose from the cards or tokens earlier. And lastly there are spots that have an auction mechanic. If you put a worker there someone could overbid you and place 2 workers. (In this case you would receive your guy back and could re-deploy them later).

👉All this and seeing what types of workers the others have, make worker placement quite tactical. After placement you activate locations in order. Most have to do with drawing cards - these are 5 types of objects you can collect. Certain locations allow you to sell cards, which is the main way of getting victory points. If you sell sets of 2 or 3 of the same type, you can get more out of it. You can also get upgrades for bonus abilities, get some money which is important for many spots, and move on the exploration track (which leads to even more bonuses).

I think this is an awesome gateway-euro. The meeple-rolling is a fun idea and the rules are easy but with some tactical depth. And the table presence of the game is so good, I think it should be very easy to hype people up to try it out. 😁