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G@mebox author Ralf Togler writes about the game:
Rich merchants, travelling throughout Europe, visiting fairs and cities and trading their goods to increase their wealth. All this during the early days of Renaissance. And Tiletum, the old name for Tielt in Belgium, in the middle of these voyages.
Well, I guess it’s not the theme that will convince you to play this boardgame. But the name of the game starts with a T, highlighted on the box, as well as on the rules. And then, the game comes from BORD & DICE, a clear signal that this game belongs to the great T-series like Teotihuacan, Tawantisuyu and Tekhenu. All these titles are great Euro games for advanced gamers or even experts. My expectations were high and (Spoiler) were not failed…
Tiletum is a so-called dice-drafting game. That is: you are rolling dice at the beginning of each round and draw a dice every turn that determines your further actions. Here, in Tiletum, the dice even has two functions: it determines the amount and the type of resources you can take while at the same time it determines the action you can carry out (as we only have W6 dice, there are six different actions, one of them a joker action).
The main board has three major sections: in the left top corner, you find an action wheel. Here you place all dice (after rolling them) according to their value at the beginning of each round. The roll determines the available actions for that round. Under this section we find a kind of marketplace for contract and character tiles that can be obtained in the action phases. Besides we find in this section a King track where players move their markers for and back during the game. At the end of each round, they will gain or lose victory points according to the position of their markers on that track.
Click on image to enlarge!The main part of the board however is reserved for a map of Europe with routes between the important cities of the Renaissance. Here we travel with our two pawns, a merchant and an architect to build up store houses and pillars in the cities and to take part in fairs that take place in four randomly chosen towns at the end of each round. So, there are four rounds and in each round a player has three turns, altogether 12 actions per game. That doesn’t sound much, but there are a lot of bonus actions you can acquire during the game, e.g. the first player who chooses a die from a section of the action wheel gets one of these bonus tiles. As said we begin with a roll of all dice each round. The players then alternately choose a die, take the resources provided by the die and perform the associated type of actions. The number of the die determines the number of resources you may take to your reserve. So, a high number is good for that purpose. The number of action points on the other hand is the result of 7 minus the value of the die, so a high number of the die is bad for the number of action points. Quite a hard decision you have to make… Click on image to enlarge!With the actions we can move our architect and merchant on the map. Besides the architect can build pillars in free spaces of some cities and the merchant can build up houses. Both are good for scoring reasons and the houses also serve us as bases when a fair takes place. Other actions let us take and place characters and contracts from the marketplace to our personal boards. Personal boards are a good keyword, because there we do a lot of the scorings. All new tiles we acquire during the game are initially placed to a storeroom on our player boards. From there they can be used (bonus tiles) or moved (character and crest tiles) to six houses with 1-3 storeys each. A completed building sets free new houses that you can place on the general map again. A similar effect has the completing of a contract (you just have to spend the resources depicted on the contract tile, because fulfilled contracts are placed on another section of the player boards where they set free new pillars. Click on image to enlarge!I hope you now have a rough idea what’s going on in Tiletum. There is more than one way to score in the game. And, because you never know what actions will be available in the next round, you regularly have to adjust your strategy. This makes the game very exciting and entertaining. Even if you’re behind the leading player you always have the feeling that you still have a chance and that your actions are lucrative. In my opinion Tiletum is a worthy representative of the great T-series of Board and Dice. Maybe it is not the most impressive one (compared to the obelisk in Tekhenu or the pyramid in Teotihuacan). But it is definitely one of the easiest to grasp. On the one hand this is down to the excellent rules with many examples, on the other hand to the limited number of actions, notwithstanding that limited number of actions doesn’t mean that you have limited choices to make. Tiletum is just a perfectly designed game. An expert game with a short (80 min) game duration, not overloaded, but still with enough possibilities to choose different strategies and to calculate the best outcomes from your actions. A game that deserves our G@mebox Star! |
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Copyright © 2023 Ralf Togler & Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Essen, Germany |