Tiwanaku

• Designer: Olivier Gregoire
• Publisher: Sit Down!
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

It is said that Wiraqocha created the sun and the pre-Columbian tribes of the Andes. Under his leadership, those who will train the mighty Inca people came out of their caves to discover new horizons in order to subsist and grow in harmony with nature. They venerated Pachamama, Mother Earth, the basis of all living things, plants and minerals, on earth and under the earth.

In Tiwanaku, first announced as Pachamama, you lead your tribe into unknown territory in search of new lands to cultivate. Your goal: To explore regions and draw outlines to develop cultures according to the customs and legacies of Pachamama. If you honor Her by respecting the great principles of diversity and complementarity, Nature will reward you; otherwise, you will suffer his wrath. In this race, risk-taking, deduction, intuition, and a good sense of timing should allow you to get through.

In this game, the Pachamama wheel will specify the secret setup for the game, and your job is to deduce the types of crops needed to be planted based on that setup.  Each scenario disc indicates a unique arrangement of terrain tiles and crop tiles. Terrain tiles are in regions of 1-5 spaces, and a region of one color does not touch a region of the same color, even diagonally. Crop tokens have a value of 1-5, and each value has a different size/color (level 1 is brown, level 2 is green, etc.). A size 1 region will contain a value 1 crop token, a size 2 region will contain crop tokens of value 1 and 2, and only a size 5 region will contain crop tokens of each value. Two identical crop values can never be adjacent, even diagonally.

To set up the game, place the board on the table, and make a general supply of offering tokens.  The Diversity board is setup nearby, and each player puts a diversity pawn at the bottom of each area. Next, choose one of the twenty scenario disks, and flip it over, so that you see the dark brown side. This will tell you how many terrain tiles to get out for the supply (placed on the Diversity board) and where some starting tiles are placed on the board.  Each starting tile is also seeded with a specific Crop tile.  Slide the wheel into the disc, and you’re ready to go.  

On a turn, take either an explore action or a divine action.

If you explore, you’re going to do something with one of your meeples. You can remove a meeple from the board. You can place a new meeple onto an unoccupied space on the edge of the board and possibly move it or you can move an already placed meeple.  If you move a meeple, it moves orthogonally one space, and if it lands in a space with a crop tile and/or a meeple of your color, it can move orthogonally again – it is legal to stop in a space that has just a crop tile in it, but it cannot stop in a space with another meeple of its own color.  It stops in an empty space or a space with just a terrain tile.  You can never move into a space with an opponent’s meeple.  If the space is empty, you then use the Pachamama wheel (and the disc inside it) to set the coordinates of your space and it tells you what type of tile to put there.  Move your Diversity pawn up on the track matching the terrain tile and then score 1 VP for each of your pawns at this level.

If you Divine, you try to deduce which crops should be planted on a previously discovered Terrain tile. Give the Pachamama wheel to another player, point at one of your meeples that is on an empty terrain tile and then announce the type of crop you think is supposed to be there.  The coordinates are dialed up and then answer is revealed. If you are right, you score points equal to the size of the tile as well as an Offering token matching that type. You can then make another divination with another meeple should one be on an empty terrain tile.  If you are wrong, you lose points equal to the size of the crop tile, which is still placed on the board, and your turn ends.

There are a few rules that always apply to the terrain and crop tiles, and good knowledge of them will help you predict what should be found where…  

• Regions of a particular terrain will be 1 to 5 tiles, and each tile in a region will have a different type of crop, always using the lowest possible levels
• Regions of the same color will never be adjacent, not even diagonally
• Crops of the same type will never be adjacent, not even diagonally

At the end of the turn, if you did an explore or successful divination action, you can hand in 1-5 offering cubes for 0-10 points. You can hold at most one offering of each color, so your offerings will always be of different colors..

When the final terrain tile is placed on the game board, the end of the game is triggered. Starting with this player, each player in turn can take a single divine action or pass. If you pass, you take no further actions. If you divine, you gain points and an offering cube like normal, or you lose points and must pass. Keep taking turns around the table until everyone has passed, then make a final offering, then see who has the most points – this player wins the game. Ties broken in favor of the player who has moved the most total spaces on the Diversity board..

My thoughts on the game

Well, there is something about these deduction games and their devices!  In the past year or so, we’ve seen Tiwanaku, Archeologic and Turing Machine – each with their own specialized gizmo to hand out clues.  There have also been a number of games like the Search for Planet X which have substituted a phone app instead of making a gizmo.  Here, you get 20 discs, each with a different game – and honestly, as long as you shuffled them up, these 20 discs essentially represent an unending supply of games as I think it would be nearly impossible to remember details of the solution.

Tiwanaku is kind of a mashup of Sudoku, Ripple Effect and a few other Nikoli puzzles – if you are unfamiliar with this genre of Japanese puzzles, I highly recommend you get lost at this website for awhile: https://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/

Each game starts out with a basic setup, and you initially try to fill the board with tiles.  As you do this, you can score bonus points for diversity on the Diversity board.  Once the board gets enough terrain tiles on it, then the game shifts to also include Divination, where you use your logic skills to deduce what crop tile should be located in that space.  

I like the way that the game makes each Divination a risk/reward process as you score positive points for a correct guess and negative points for a wrong guess.  There is a bit of time pressure, but this can also be alleviated with clever meeple placement – as other players cannot move through enemy meeples, you might be able to isolate a space so that you’re the only player to be able to guess at a spot; and if you are not sure, maybe you wait for additional information to be available to help increase your chances of a correct guess.

One thing I missed in my first few games is that it is super important to keep an eye out on which terrain tiles are left in the supply.  While they are not on the board, you can often figure out what sorts of regions must be on the board, even if those tiles haven’t been placed yet.  And, if you know the size of a region, you’ll know which crops have to be contained within that region, and that in turn may help you figure out what is supposed to go on the terrain tiles already on the board.  (if that sounds rambling and nonsensical, it’ll all make sense once you play a game of Tiwanaku!)  In the end, sometimes it’s still worth it to make an educated guess or a 50/50 guess -especially if there is a significant diversity bonus to be had for a small crop.  

There is also a bit of skill in lining up all your meeples so that you can take a huge Divination turn and possibly get 3, 4 or 5 correct guesses in a row.  Maximizing your plays like this is a huge boon as you are so much more efficient.  

This game does really feel like it could just be a solo game (and there is a solo game included in the rules), but the board play involving meeple placement and movement does allow this to work just fine in the competitive sense.  There is a surprising amount of skill/strategy in getting your meeples to the right places to be able to guess at the higher value tiles.  At first I thought it was more random luck, but after seeing the same players consistently score the majority of 4s and 5s in our games, it became clear that there was skill involved.

The components are decent enough (I have a retail copy, not a fancy KS copy), and the wheel works well.  There is one bit of human error that happens occasionally – on the wheel, there are two sliders, one that shows the terrain type for a location and one that shows the crop that goes there.  Make sure that you only look at the Terrain type when you’re placing that tile so that you don’t blow it and prematurely learn what crop goes there!    The windows try to make it clear, but man, it feels like each of my first few games had at least one accidental reveal of info…  Also, I would note that my retail copy had a packet of errata discs; apparently discs 3-6 are incorrect and replacement discs were included in a separate ziploc baggie.  Make sure that when you open your game that you throw out the bad ones before confusion reigns.

For me, this is the surprising puzzle game that works as well for me in the solo mode as it does in the multiplayer mode (well at least competitive).  There are cooperative rules in the box, but after reading them to my group, no one wanted to even try that way, so I can’t comment much more on them other than that.  Games are fairly quick, maybe 30-40 minutes, and setup/teaching only takes a few minutes.  The back cover of the rules has a nice summarization of the important logic rules and an example puzzle which should be enough to get most gamers up and running in only a few minutes.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Jonathan: (one play) – We liked it as an idea, but as with many other non-social deduction games, it did not seem fun and there was quite a bit of zugzwang where you knew that whatever you did was handing points to someone else. A cool experience.

Dan B. (1 play): I like deduction games in general and I like what this is trying to do, but it didn’t seem as if the early game was that interesting. Once you have enough information to have at least a reasonable shot at making deductions, it gets better. I’d certainly be willing to try it again, but there are enough better deduction games out there that I am not going to make it a priority.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. 
• Neutral. Dale Y, Jonathan F, Steph H, Dan B.
• Not for me.