Teotihuacan: City of Gods

Teotihuacan: City of Gods is a heavy strategy game designed by Daniele Tascini and published by Board&Dice in 2018. Players take on the roles of leaders guiding the development of the great Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan, constructing the Pyramid of the Sun, building houses, developing technologies, and honoring the gods at three great temples. The game’s defining innovation is its use of dice as workers. These dice are never rolled. Instead, their face values represent the experience and power of each worker, increasing as the worker takes actions around a modular rondel board.

The community holds Teotihuacan in high regard, with many players placing it among the top heavy euros of the past decade. The dice-worker rondel system draws consistent praise for feeling genuinely fresh in a crowded genre. Criticism centers on the rulebook’s organizational issues and the overwhelming number of interlocking systems that make the first few plays a steep climb. The game polarizes slightly on player count, with a strong consensus that four players produces the best experience.

Dice That Tell a Story

The dice-worker mechanism is what sets Teotihuacan apart from every other game on the shelf. Each player controls a set of dice that represent workers. As a worker performs main actions at different locations around the board, its die value increases by one. A worker that started as a one gradually becomes a two, then a three, and so on. Higher-value workers perform more powerful actions and contribute more effectively to group efforts like pyramid construction. This progression gives each worker a narrative arc, and managing the growth trajectories of your entire workforce becomes a deeply engaging puzzle.

Ascension adds a brilliant wrinkle to the worker progression. When a die reaches its maximum value, it “ascends,” granting the player significant bonuses before resetting to a lower value. The timing of these ascensions is critical. Pushing a worker to ascend at just the right moment, when you can maximize the bonus while positioning yourself for the next round of actions, creates decision points that experienced players agonize over in the best way. The tension between keeping a powerful worker active and triggering a lucrative ascension is constant.

The rondel movement system forces meaningful choices every turn. On your turn, you move one worker clockwise around the board to a new location and choose between taking that location’s main action (which upgrades the worker) or collecting a worship bonus (which doesn’t upgrade). The board’s circular structure means you’re always balancing where you want to be against where your workers currently sit. Planning several moves ahead, accounting for other players’ positions, and adapting when someone lands on your target space keeps every turn feeling consequential.

Temple tracks and pyramid construction provide parallel scoring paths that demand attention throughout the game. Advancing on the three temple tracks earns bonuses at specific thresholds, and these bonuses compound when timed with other actions. Contributing tiles to the Pyramid of the Sun scores points based on placement and decoration. Neither path can be ignored entirely, and finding the right balance between temple devotion and pyramid contribution is one of the game’s core strategic tensions.

Teotihuacan’s Steep First Ascent

The rulebook is the game’s most widely acknowledged weakness. The organization makes finding specific rules during play unnecessarily difficult, with subheadings that don’t always track logically and explanations that over-elaborate on some points while glossing over others. Players frequently report needing to reference external guides or community resources to clarify interactions that the rulebook handles poorly. The game itself isn’t as complicated as the rules make it seem, but the learning curve is steeper than it needs to be because of how the information is presented.

System density overwhelms on the first play. Between the eight action locations on the rondel, three temple tracks, pyramid construction rules, technology tracks, resource management, and multiple types of bonuses, new players face an intimidating wall of options. The game does have an internal logic that makes everything click once you’ve internalized it, but reaching that point requires patience. Groups that give up after one confusing first game miss the experience that makes Teotihuacan worth the investment.

Player count sensitivity is a real consideration. The game is designed so that all four player colors are always in play, with unused colors controlled by a simple automated system at lower counts. At four players, the board feels alive with dice moving around the rondel, creating dynamic interactions and competition for space. At two players, the automated workers do their job, but the energy of a full table is missing. The community leans heavily toward recommending the game at its maximum count.

The game can produce analysis paralysis in players prone to it. With multiple workers to choose from, each at different locations and power levels, the decision tree on any given turn branches quickly. Players who need to evaluate every possible move before committing can slow the game significantly, and at four players this compounds into session lengths that push well past the listed two-hour window.

The Power of Growing Workers

What makes Teotihuacan’s design so effective is that it solves a problem most worker placement games share. In a standard worker placement game, your workers are identical tokens that block spaces. In Teotihuacan, your workers have individual identities defined by their power level and position. You care about which specific worker goes where, not just whether you have one available. This transforms worker placement from a blocking exercise into something closer to managing a team, where each member has different capabilities and different needs. That shift in perspective is what gives the game its distinctive feel and keeps experienced players coming back.

Should You Play Teotihuacan: City of Gods?

Heavy euro enthusiasts who want a game that offers a genuinely novel take on worker placement will find the dice-worker system rewarding. Groups of four who enjoy games with substantial depth and don’t mind investing two or three learning games before the experience fully opens up are the ideal audience. Solo players looking for a meaty puzzle will find a solid solo variant included.

Skip it if your group has low tolerance for complex first plays, if you primarily game at two players and want an experience specifically tuned for that count, or if analysis paralysis is a common issue at your table.

The Verdict on Teotihuacan: City of Gods

Teotihuacan: City of Gods is a heavy euro that earns its complexity through a genuinely original dice-worker system. Moving your workers around the rondel, watching them grow in power, and timing their ascension creates a rhythm unlike anything else in the genre. The rulebook does the game no favors, and the sheer number of interlocking systems will overwhelm players who aren’t ready for it. But once the mechanisms click into place, Teotihuacan reveals itself as a precision-built engine of interconnected decisions where every move ripples across the board. For heavy euro fans looking for something that feels distinct from the standard worker placement formula, this one delivers.