Founders of Teotihuacan: a tile-laying game inspired by Teotihuacan!
“Before we get to the cool stuff, please allow me to describe why I designed this game and its relationship to Teotihuacan: City of Gods.
Let’s go back in time to the Origins Game Fair in 2018. When Irek, Andrei, and I were traveling from the airport in Chicago to Columbus, we were making plans for the merger of Board&Dice and NSKN Games (which happened in November later that year). Later that day, after setting up our respective booths, Andrei and Rainer showed us their upcoming Spiel premiere, Teotihuacan: City of Gods. Even though I was exhausted from a long day, the game clicked with me and I fell in love with it.
Now, let’s move forward to when we were in the early stages of work for the final expansion for Teotihuacan. The base game was scheduled to receive its third solid expansion telling the story of the city after the events of the base game.
I asked myself: if we are not expanding the base game further, what if we could expand the experience with a standalone game, set in time before the events of Teotihuacan: City of Gods.
Initially just a fun exercise, I started designing a game to explore what such a game could be about. My initial criteria was:
– the game should focus on the city surrounding the pyramid, but the pyramid will score dependent on how you build the city.
– preserve the spirit of Teotihuacan: City of Gods by using familiar elements of the game that players will recognize, despite being tied to completely different mechanisms.
Every aspect of the game design was drawing inspiration from its source material. Teotihuacan: City of Gods is an amazing game, expanded to its limits with fantastic expansions. But that does not mean the story needs to come to an end.
In the end, I arrived at a completed design which I presented to the team; and here we are now 🙂
Travel back in time to the founding of one of the greatest cities of Mesoamerica, and become once again a part of its history. Design the foundation of a great pre-Columbian civilization, with its buildings, temples, and a grand pyramid in the center. Prove to be the best among competing architects, and your project will secure you a spot among the great Founders of Teotihuacan!
In Founders of Teotihuacan, 1 to 4 players compete to create the best-designed city of Teotihuacan. Over the course of three or four rounds, players place their disks on Action spaces, forming towers of varying strength, and perform Actions that allow them to build Temples, Buildings, and the Pyramid central to their vision of Teotihuacan. Once the eclipse comes, all designs are assessed—and the player who scores the most points wins.
Premiere: May 2022
Game Components:
1 main board
4 double-sided player boards
4 wooden architect meeples
24 action disks
9 bonus disks
8 marker disks
30 brown wood cubes
30 grey stone cubes
30 yellow gold cubes
1x 8-sided die
160+ cardboard tiles, including:
▪ production buildings, ▪ temples,
▪ pyramid tiles,
▪ masks,
▪ worship tiles,
▪ sun and eclipse markers, ▪ and more!”
