How to play Founders of Teotihuacan

Founders of Teotihuacan is a tile-laying, action selection game.

Title: Founders of Teotihuacan

Year Published: 2022

Designer: Filip Głowacz

Publisher: Board&Dice

Players: 1-4

Game Time: ~60 minutes

Set-up Time: ~10 minutes

Ages: 14+

Theme: Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

Mechanisms: Action Point Allowance, Tile-Laying

How to win: Score the most points by building Pyramids and Temples.

Game Description

Travel back in time to the founding of one of the greatest cities of Mesoamerica and become a part of its history once again. Design the foundations of a great pre-Columbian civilization, with its buildings, temples, and a grand pyramid in the center. Find perfect locations for production buildings and great temples, and build the might of the great pyramid overlooking your city. Establish yourself as the very best among competing architects, and your project will secure you a spot among the great Founders of Teotihuacan!

How to play Founders of Teotihuacan

A brief video showing how to play the game for 2-4 players. Solo rules are available in a separate rulebook.

Theme

I don’t really know anything about this theme other than in pictures I have seen. I know that building Temples and Pyramids is a big deal. Not sure if they have an architect circling the town though.

Setup & Rulebook

The setup is fiddley. You have piles all over the board that differ for the player count. These numbers were not printed on the board at all and that would have been very useful.

The rulebook is well laid out with big boxes for key information which I really liked. But some important stuff was buried in a long paragraph.

Components & Artwork

The components are fine. Not sure why players are scoring points on their own board and not on the board in the middle. It’s easy to knock those small tokens off the even smaller numbers.

No artwork to speak of, just thematic squiggles and symbology.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It is easy to teach. However, there is a niggly bit where you have to build buildings during setup but of course, there are a lot of rules to teach for people to understand that.

So you have to put that on hold, teach the game then come back to it. You also can’t flip over worship tiles until after that step of the setup so you have to reshuffle them after teaching. It’s just annoying.

But, everything is face-up so new players can be introduced to the game.

Founders of Teotihuacan Summary

So let’s look at the positives.

The architect, as annoying as it is, made you plan your turns and put thought into what you were doing. You really need to plan ahead.

The pyramid and temple scoring was really good fun and required a lot of planning ahead.

The action selection thing is really good allowing players that go first to get a bonus but later players get a leg up on action strength.

I enjoyed deciding if you want to pile on disks for a couple of big actions or spread yourself thin and take fewer smaller ones.

But, there are negatives.

For so few options, it plays as slow as a heavy euro but it’s not heavy enough to give you much to think about while you’re waiting so it gets boring.

There is that weird thing where you have to teach part of the game before finishing setup that just adds to the awkwardness.

There are not enough turns to feel that you’ve done enough, but you don’t want to take more turns as the game isn’t fun enough.

While playing, I thought of other tile-laying games I’d rather play, like Barenpark.

Founders of Teotihuacan Round-Up

I really wanted to like this game, I just couldn’t.

Rating

I give it a 3/10

Note: The copy I played was a review copy generously provided by Board & Dice, big thanks to them for this game.