Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Princes of Machu Picchu

Princes of Machu Picchu Price: £39.99 Currently unavailable. RRP = £42.99 Board Game; 2-5 Players; Ages 12+ by Rio Grande Games After the Spaniards conquered the Incan Empire, some Incan princes could flee into the mountains to a well hidden place: The lost city of Machu Picchu. But they are in danger to be discovered by the Spaniards: Can the city survive with the help of all their priests and virgins of the sun? Or will the Spaniards discover the secret place? The destiny of Machu Picchu will be decided upon within only a few days! You will be one of those princes in town. Your workers will grow corn, plant coca, feed Llamas, and manufacture pottery and cloth. Your priests and virgins will sacrifice at the temples of the city. Whether the Incans or the Spaniards will win depends on the Princes of Machu Picchu themselves. If their workers produce often and all their priests and virgins will help, the Incans will win. If they don’t work hard everyday and their priests and virgins don’t hurry to help, the Spaniards have a good chance of discovering the lost city. GAME REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE PD-Games 2-5 players, 90-120 minutes designed by Mac Gerdts reviewed by Simon Weinberg Llamas, virgins, silk shirts and coca leaves - Mac Gerdts is back and in this, his fourth game, the author of Antike, Imperial and Hamburgum, has produced another interesting game which is heavy on theme while being arguably lighter weight than his previous designs. The game takes Mac\'s famous rondel to a new level - this time it is heavily disguised and rather than move around a circle, players move their prince from one region to a neighbouring one on the board which triggers a single action affecting them or all players with Inca pieces in that region. The regions are cleverly designed so that more desirable regions border less areas - but movement restrictions can be overcome by paying a llama which treks you across as many regions as you want in one go. The game is one of resource collection with a twist whereby the players may influence the end game condition. The objective of this game, which evokes the Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire, is to accumulate resources to buy virgins and priests, place Inca workers in different regions to get further resources, and in this way accumulate so-called sacrifice cards. The sacrifice cards are scored in two different ways at the end of the game: if a Spanish Conquest of Machu Picchu is unsuccessful, then players earn victory points from placing Inca workers in the regions corresponding to the symbols on their cards; however if the conquest is successful, the players with the most and second-most gold on their cards will be able to multiply their basic victory points by three and two respectively and thus change the outcome of the game. The game comes in a long box the size of Hamburgum, but unlike that game is published exclusively by PD Games without the co-operation of Eggert Spiele. Talking to the publishers, it seems that Hamburgum gave them enough experience to go alone this time round - and certainly the production standard is every bit as good as Hamburgum. The board is double sided (English and German) and the rule book is beautiful and clearly written, and supplemented by an interesting guide to the history of the game written by Mac, whose wife comes from Peru. The pieces are all decent-sized wooden pieces. The board and box artwork were not liked by all of the people I have played with, but do not essentially detract from the game. The sacrifice cards are nicely designed although of the small Ticket to Ride size whilst I prefer full-size cards. Throughout the game, players may either move their Prince pawn into a neighbouring region or pass and take a moon counter. The moon counters provide bonus benefits which are cashed in at ``night\'\' at the end of the round. When three moon counters are taken, the round ends, the sun counter is taken (nicely revealing the moon below it on the board) by the player who ended the round, and night actions are taken (mostly replenishing the board). The sun player starts the first move of the next day. After 9 days, the game ends with a Spanish Conquest; however if all priests and virgins are bought beforehand, the game ends with the rescue of Machu Picchu. The city of Machu Picchu contains fifteen total regions through which the players may move. Five regions produce the resources of the game: llamas, silk shirts (which were made for the Emperor exclusively by the virgins, and worn once before being burnt), coca leaves, clay pottery, and corn, which is used as currency in the game - again true to the way Incan society worked. Three further areas of the board are temples dedicated to the Priests of Condor and Puma and to the Sun God: to worship in the temple requires sacrificing a llama to the gods. Priests and Virgins are bought with resources in two other areas. Two further regions allow placement of Incan workers by paying a mixture of different resources: these workers may be placed in the 5 different regions producing resources. There are two other regions: a main temple where players can sacrifice goods instead of llamas and don\'t have to own a priest or virgin to do so; and a region of the Sun Clock, which is used to remove an Incan worker from the board, allowing it to be placed back elsewhere on another go. Finally, there is a central market area where goods and llamas may be bought from or sold to the market, at a rate varying with the number of goods already on the market. During the night at the end of each round, each region yielding resources receives an additional ``free\'\' resource, and each temple receives a temple stone. These 9 total regions may only be triggered once per day (round). When the first player in a round lands on a resource-producing regions he receives the free resource, and all other players may pay a corn to receive a resource, for each Inca they have in that region. When a player lands in the temple regions, he receives the temple stone and he and all other players may make a sacrifice to the gods, but this can only be done once per priest (for Puma and Condor) or virgin (for the Sun God) that they own. Each of these actions is allowed only once per round, so turn order is important, as is the need to do things in the right sequence: buy a priest or virgin, get llamas, then sacrifice, for example - and this creates the kind of tension we usually associate with the rondel actions. So far I have described the way the players move through different areas to generate resources, buy priests and virgins, and make sacrifices. Llamas are particularly valuable as they can be used to jump regions and to sacrifice, and corn is essential to ensure that when resources are produced, they may be obtained by paying a corn per resource. However, all these actions work towards two purposes: to obtain sacrifice cards, and to position Incans for the final scoring of these cards. But how are sacrifice cards obtained? The way this is done is quite clever and adds an extra layer of buffering between the simple collection of resources and the obtention of victory points. One side of the board depicts the Incan trail, a series of 20 steps leading up to a mountain summit. Along the way is a Granary, which yields corn, and a Llama Stable yielding -- llamas. When a player takes a temple stone, sacrifices to a god, takes one of two specific moon bonus tiles, or removes an Incan from the board via the Sun Clock, he receives a number of steps along the Incan trail. When the summit is reached, the player earns a sacrifice card and moves back to the bottom of the mountain. In fact, the player takes 3 cards from the pile, adds them to his hand, and then returns any two sacrifice cards to the bottom of the stack, allowing him to optimise the cards he picks up quite well. As the game progresses, and more cards are picked up, he must move or place his Incan workers, and buy priests and virgins, to be able to maximise his score. At the end of the game, players reveal their sacrifice cards. Each card contains 2 of the 8 possible symbols representing the two sorts of priest, the virgin, and the five resource producing regions, plus a value in gold. For the resources, players sum the number of symbols of each type on the cards they hold and multiply that by the number of Incan workers they have in that region. For the Priests and Virgins, they multiply instead by the number of priests or virgins of that type they have accumulated during the game. As an example, if you end up with two Inca workers in the corn region, and 3 corn symbols on your sacrifice card, you earn 2 x 3 = 6 victory points for corn. You may then also earn 1 point for a single Incan in the pottery region and one single pottery symbol on a card, and 6 points for three Puma symbols and two Puma priests. For a Machu Picchu rescue, that is all that happens. However for a Spanish conquest, which occurs only when a full 9 days have been played, the amount of gold each player has on their cards is also summed, and points calculated above then multiplied by 3 or 2 for the top two gold-owning players. Machu Picchu is a complex game to explain but, once players understand how to transfer resources into sacrifices, Incan workers, and eventually victory points, play proceeds smoothly without too much scope for analysis paralysis, giving the game a light feeling which is helped by the theme itself. The restriction of producing resources or sacrificing only once per `day,\' together with the bonus resources available at the beginning of each day plus the bonuses available from the moon counters, produces some nice tension as players vie to be first in a region to get the bonuses or make sacrifices early. However, the fact that all 15 regions of the board are usually visited every round, which itself takes time as players must sometimes move through uneventful previously-triggered areas, make for a very different game to Hamburgum or Imperial, and can sometimes lengthen a round unnecessarily. Like many resource generation games, you can find yourself repeating yourself a lot each round and this may or may not be a problem for your gaming group. Interestingly, when we played the game in Essen, we made one of those well-known Essen cock-ups and allowed the triggering of resources or sacrifices each time a player landed in a resource region rather than once per turn, and I would actually consider this a variant worth exploring since it moves the game on a little quicker without changing too many of basic tensions in the game which come more from the sacrifices and the moon counters. Where the game may also fall down in some people\'s opinions, is in the hidden nature of the Victory Points until the game end, preventing full visibility of how the competition is doing. This is, however, somewhat mitigated by the fact that the number of sacrifice cards certainly seem to indicate who is doing well in the game. Machu Picchu is an excellently thought-out and constructed game with a nice theme running through it, and a lightness of feel combined with a number of original ideas which for me make it a nice experience to play. The jury is really out as to its staying power, but I believe it is good enough and entertaining enough to buy despite its middle ground position as a game that is relatively easy to play once understood, but quite difficult to get used to at first, and perhaps a little over-long for some people\'s taste. More ...

Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Princes of Machu Picchu