Tiwanaku’s rulebook starts off with ‘Pachamama (Mother Earth) guides the Quechua people in their search for fertile lands. […] Lead your people to uncharted territories in search of new lands to farm. You seek to explore these regions, to trace their contours, and to develop agriculture there according to the customs and legends of Pachamama. If you honor her by respecting her core principles of diversity and separation, Nature will reward you. If not, you will suffer her ire. Deduction and a good sense of “timing” should help you succeed…’
Well, OK… Not amazingly informative, that.
Belgian publisher, Sit Down! has this to say on the game’s web page: ‘Tiwanaku is an extraordinary game skilfully combining Minesweeper and Sudoku mechanics. It is played on a board without an app, thanks to the Pachamama Wheel, which allows you to play with different, replayable scenarios/grids.’
That’s better, though I’d say it’s more like the Suguru, pictured above, than straight up Sudoku, and I’m not really seeing much Minesweeper in it.
Tiwanaku is a 1–4 player game of logical deduction in which players have to determine what type of terrain forms each square on the map, and then what crop has been planted there. You are given a few starting points (like the numbers given in a Sudoku puzzle) and some constraints (akin to Sudoku’s rules about not having the same number repeated in a row or column). In standard Sudoku, you have 9 squares of 9 spaces in which numbers can’t be repeated, whereas in Suguru, you have 9 arbitrarily shaped tessellating regions instead; in Tiwanaku, those regions are of varying size and are not known to players up front—they have to work them out. Also, unlike Sudoku, rows and columns can contain duplicate terrain and crops.
The first constraint is that each of the 4 terrain types (dirt, sand, grass and rock) appears in contiguous orthogonal sections of up to 5 tiles, and terrain sections are never adjacent to others of the same type, even diagonally. The second is that each terrain section can contain at most a single example of each of the 5 crops (sweet potato, coca leaf, chilli, corn and quinoa, numbered 1–5, respectively), and they always appear in that order with no gaps (e.g., a single-tile terrain segment will contain only sweet potato—number 1; and a 4-tile segment will contain exactly sweet potato, coca leaf, chilli and corn, i.e., numbers 1–4; quinoa will never appear in a 4-tile terrain segment). Like terrain segments, the same crop will never appear in orthogonally or diagonally adjacent squares.
The game comes with 20 ‘scenario discs’ which define the starting terrain tiles and crops. These discs contain the answer on the back, in a rather cryptic form, and that players shouldn’t look at. Instead, after laying out the disc’s starting configuration on the map, you slot the disc into the cunning ‘Pachamama wheel’ which you use to reveal clues as the game progresses.
A few of the discs are for a simpler 5×5 map (above, an almost complete game) and the rest are for the full 9×5 experience (see later).
Now, if the game was only about deducing the contents of the spaces, this would be just a straight up logic puzzle, but there’s more to it than that…
Playing the Game
One more constraint is that you can only ‘ask’ the Pachamama wheel about a space when that space is occupied by one of your meeples, so a significant component of the game is racing to the best scoring spaces while attempting to slow down or block your opponents.
Each player has a certain number of ‘Quechua’ meeples: 5 in a 2-player game, 4 with 3 players and 3 when there are 4 players. On your turn you can either explore (move and discover) or divine; I’ll describe discovery and divination in a bit, but movement is orthogonal across squares containing both terrain and crops—i.e., you must stop on squares that are totally empty or that contain only terrain. Additionally, you cannot enter a space containing another player’s meeple, though you can pass over your own meeples. You can move as many spaces as you want, and can take a right angle turn on squares with crops or your own meeples, but cannot end movement on the space you started from. Meeples enter the board from any edge space, and if you’re blocked, you have the option of using your movement step to take a meeple off the map.
After movement, if your meeple ends up on a space with no terrain tile, you perform the discovery step, using the wheel to tell you what terrain is present there. Turn the disc contained in the wheel to match the map column of the space containing your meeple and the lever at the bottom to match the row, then open the discovery window using the red knob on the left side of the wheel. Place a terrain tile of the revealed type on the map and move your ‘diversity token’ up the scale, scoring points for all tokens at that scale level. Because you score based on the number of tokens you have at a single level, it pays to be strategic about which empty spaces you navigate to, in order to maximise your scoring potential.
As an alternative to exploration, if you have one or more meeples on terrain spaces with no crops, you can perform divination actions for as many of those meeples as you want, stating what crops you think are on those spaces.
As with discovery, you ask the wheel to determine if your guess was correct—or rather, a player other than you asks (though I can’t fathom why it has to be someone else as the correct crop will be revealed to everyone shortly). Once again, move the disc and lever to match the coordinates of the space, and use the righthand knob to open the divination window to find out what’s there. If you were correct, you gain points according to the crop type (sweet potato gaining a single point, up to quinoa gaining 5) as well as an offering token (which can be traded in—er, I mean, offered to Pachamama—for more points); and you can then make another divination if you want. If you were wrong, you lose the number of points corresponding to the correct crop type, and you don’t get to perform any further divinations.
The game ends when the final terrain tile has been placed, so don’t leave divination too late, in case you miss out on scoring for crops.
The game offers a solo mode, which operates like a 2-player game where movement of your opponent is controlled by arrows on the backs of the terrain tiles. The image above shows a solo game after about half a dozen turns, incidentally using the disc that appeared earlier in the article. There’s also a similar cooperative mode, except each player additionally owns a fraction of the yet to be placed terrain tiles, making them available when necessary, which also affects how the current player’s chosen meeple moves.
Verdict
Tiwanaku is an interesting puzzle of a game that should appeal to Sudoku addicts. But it would be nothing more than a logic puzzle without the meeple movement restrictions, which add a race element to the game.
I like the clever Pachamama wheel device, though do worry a little about its longevity. On the topic of longevity, there are only 20 game discs, and if you play the game a lot, you might start to remember some parts of the solution. However, an expansion pack offers another 20 discs. Even better, Pablo Cazorla has created a nifty little web app which can generate arbitrary maps randomly—both sizes, thus dramatically expanding the quantity of smaller maps from the very small number provided. The app also means you can pack the wheel away and not worry about destroying it!
One thing I would like to see is a ‘difficulty level’—similar to how you can get easy vs hard Sudoku games, it’d be nice to have easy and hard discs/maps, so you can decide how much brain strain you want. It may be that smaller numbers of initially defined spots on the map indicates more difficult puzzles, but I’ve not verified this. Of course, making a wrong guess doesn’t mess up the rest of the game, as it would in Sudoku, but just costs you points, so using a too-difficult setup isn’t as drastic a mistake here.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
