Tiletum (Game Review by Ben Bruckart)

• Designer:  Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini
• Publisher:  Board and Dice
• Players:  1-4
• Ages:  14+
• Time:  75-120 Minutes
• Times Played: 4

Theme

Tiletum refers to the modern day city of Tielt in Belgium. Imagine for a moment, that you are a merchant traveling through Renaissance Europe and establishing trade houses, fulfilling contracts, building cathedrals, gaining favor of nobles, and participating in fairs.  Easy and familiar Eurogame theme.

But what is it really?

Tiletum is a dice selection, action game where dice are rolled and placed around a wheel that rewards actions with an inversely proportional amount of resources. Specifically, the number of Action Points (AP) you get is equal to 7 minus the number of resources gained. For example, if you take a die that grants you 5 resources, you would only gain 2 APs. There are just six dice slots and 5 actions plus a wild you must manage to win victory points.

How do you measure 18 years?  In my case, through the playing of 13,000 games.  I started logging my games played using BoardGameGeek in 2005 and somehow I find myself 18 years later still loving the hobby and the data. I really enjoy being able to reflect on my games played data and the experiences of these games.

I wrote about hitting 10,000 games played back in 2019, and now at the beginning of 2023, I’ve just hit 13,000 games played.  I thought it would be a good time to see what those 3,000 latest game plays included.  There are a lot of interesting things buried in the data from those 3,000 plays.

First things first, the 13,000th play was none other than the wonderful Starship Captains by Peter Hoffgaard.  I tried a prototype of the game last year and was really intrigued by the queue system for managing workers, and I picked up the published version a month ago to see where it landed.  The production values are top notch as usual for CGE with really dynamic and engaging visuals.  More importantly, the gameplay is really stellar, harkening back to classic German-style design of simple rules, dense iconography, and impressive variability – all tied together in a package laden with difficult and meaningful decision-making.  I’ve played the game 4 times now, and I’m looking forward to hopefully many more plays to explore this design.  There seem to be a few rough edges with extraneous rules, but I really enjoy studying the opening technologies and missions to decide on a path forward to grow my ship’s crew and try to implement synergies so that my handful of actions go as far as possible.  It’s also one of those games that ends right when you’re getting going, so I’m tempted to play a fifth round, but it’s always better for a game to feel like it’s ending too soon rather than going on too long.  Ultimately, it’s a tense and engaging game that I’m enjoying a lot these days.

Getting from my 10,000th play of Antiquity in 2019 to my 13,000th play of Starship Captains in 2023 meant playing 3,000 games over the past three and a half years.  Those 3,000 plays were made up of 398 different games (which means an average of 7.5 plays per game).  However, some games were played a lot more than that, such as Netrunner (157 plays), KeyForge (71 plays), and Railroad Ink (59 plays)… while over 120 other games were one and done.

I spent this past weekend in Cincinnati at T8, a small trick taking convention run by fellow OG-er James Nathan. Longtime readers know that I’m an enormous fan of trick taking games  — I have written numerous articles about them over the years, and I design them — but I had never attended a trick taking only convention.

To quote one attendee, T8 was heaven. I could write a full convention report, but this article is just about the highlights: the games, the moments, and the people that made this a special weekend.

By the Numbers

• 17 New-to-Me Trick Taking and Climbing Games
• 8 Trick Taking Games I’d Played Before
• 7 Games Not Involving Trick Taking or Climbing
• 9 Unpublished Prototypes (6 Trick Taking and 3 Non-Trick Taking)
• 1 Game Designed for the Convention (BoardGameGeek Page: T8)
• 1 Game Designed and Playtested On Site
• 4 Times Eating Skyline Chili
• 30+ Different People Played With

Overall Favorite New-to-Me Games

This is probably a three way tie, and interestingly, all of the games are climbing/shedding games, so maybe I’ve been in a mood for them.