Dwight

My whole family of 4 sat down at GENCON to play this game. We spent 20 minutes learning the rules and then another 30 minutes playing. We didn’t finish the game. After a few turns each we all looked at each other and it was clear that we could be spending our time playing something else.

Tikal, the original game is one of my favorite games. It was explained that this game is not that one and I should not compare them. So I kept an open mind but if you didn’t want comparisons then why call this one “Tikal II”?

There are 3 main ways the games are alike:
1 – The setting is similar. You are in a jungle exploring a temple.
2 – On your turn you lay tiles that give new access to areas of the board. The final board can be different each time you play.
3 – You collect treasures that you later redeem for points.

The games are not alike in that you don’t have action points to spend each turn. Instead you have a selection of actions bundles. Each bundle has 2 or three things you can do. But once the bundle is used its gone for half the game.

The only other major way the games are not alike is in the way you move about the board. You collect different color keys and depending on which keys you owned determined where you could go. This was I didn’t like the most. The problem was it seemed like it was pretty easy to move just about anywhere you wanted to go every turn if you only put a small amount of thought behind it.

I liked the mechanic for how much the treasures are worth at any given moment. It was a bit random and a bit press your luck. When the not so often opportunities arrived to sell your treasures you could wait for them to be more valuable or take the value they were worth. Once you sold them the value indicator would rotate changing the future value of all of them.

I was disappointed. The game doesn’t have much tension for me. I am a fan of Wolfgang Kramer and I wanted Tikal II to be more great Tiakl fun.