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The cooperative board game space is an increasingly crowded one. Competitive euro games reside in an even more densely packed demographic. Then we have Tindaya. A survival euro game that can be played cooperatively or competitively. Can it really offer enough to stand out in both of these spheres? After all, board gamers are nearly as demanding as the two gods in Tindaya. Let us hope it does enough to appease.
Island Survival.
Tindaya sees players, in a solo, coop or competitive fashion, attempting to see off conquistadors and appease their two demanding and capricious gods. They move around the map, learn and share technologies, grow their population, breed animals, feed their populace and make offerings to their gods. They have nobles and villagers. They can walk around and gather resources from their islands, or sail to new ones. There is a heck of a lot going on here; be aware that this is a complex game. Fortunately then, that the rulebook is a pretty good one.
When you get up and running with Tindaya, you will discover a solid slab of thematic and innovative euro design. To start, the game is very fluid. Which disasters happen and where they occur demands hard decisions of the players. You’re delighted with your goat engine and feeding your people easily with their milk production? Sorry, not for much longer. There’s a tsunami on its way at the end of the round. Now, you’ll need to decide if you butcher them for weapons and food, or release them into the wild, ensuring a healthy pool to draw from when you set up a farm on a safer island.
Tindaya throws up scenarios like that over each of its 3 rounds (eras). It helps to remember that the ultimate goal is one of survival and not one of having an array of impressive infrastructure spread over the island network.
Offerings and Prophecies.
The disasters at the end of each era are a large part of what makes Tindaya tick. They scale according to each god’s anger level too, resulting in larger volcanic eruptions that could merge islands, or islands disappearing altogether into the ocean.
These can be mitigated by meeting the gods’ demands for offerings during the course of each era. This is simply done by visiting a volcano with a noble and sacrificing the required resource. Of course, should you have fought off and captured any conquistadors, they count as wild and can be sacrificed in place of any resource. These gods are nothing if not bloodthirsty.
Meeting their demands will lower the gods’ wrath. This will not stop any disasters, but will reduce the size of the impact area and make them easier to manage as a result.
Players know exactly what will happen and where it will happen at the end of the first era. If they wish to know this information for the second (and then third) era(s), they must offer items for burning in the flames of the seers.
Meet one requirement and you can choose to discover what will happen, or where it will happen. Meet both and you are once again equipped with full knowledge of the impending disaster.
This knowledge is invaluable. On occasion though, whether due to pressures on resources from the gods themselves, or perhaps a player figures they can ride whatever storm comes their way in competitive mode and refuses to help, players could be ending an era blind to what the gods have in store. Never then, is the turn of a card so tense…
The Technologies of Tindaya.
One of the innovative touches in Tindaya is the way different players begin as masters of different technologies. There are 4 in the game; fishing, goat herding, agriculture and pig farming. Each player will start with access to 2 of them, and have greater proficiency in one of their 2.
To unlock the others, players have to end the round with one of their nobles in the same space as a settlement of the technology they want to learn, belonging to another player. This is a delightfully thematic touch, where the different tribes pass on their knowledge and understanding to others.
This happening at the end of the round also allows an opportunity for players to be… shall we say… ‘less than helpful’ in the competitive game. You are the goat master. You see an opposing tribe’s noble visiting your fine goat farm, wanting to also know how to herd the goats. There’s nothing stopping you butchering the goats, or abandoning that space before the end of the round, thus preventing any sharing of knowledge…
Cooperation is Better Than Conflict.
Yes, you could be irksome to your fellow players in the competitive game, as outlined above. However, there are a series of auto loss conditions in Tindaya that apply in both cooperative and competitive modes.
Fail to appease the gods enough and they become incandescent with rage and everyone loses. Too many conquistadors settle the islands and everyone loses. In a cooperative game, if any player’s tribe is wiped out, everyone loses.
These conditions ensure that there is cooperation between players to make the required offerings to the gods, to battle the conquistadors and to ensure the game reaches the end of era 3 scoring.
The scoring is tight enough in competitive play that it may be tricky for a single player to deliberately tank the game, but do be aware of this as a possibility and consider if this is likely to be an issue in your game group. If so, playing Tindaya cooperatively is probably the way to go.
Speaking of which, Tindaya is an excellent cooperative game, in the truest sense of the phrase. It’s complexity means the problem of the ‘alpha gamer’ or ‘quarterbacking’, that can be prevalent in some coops, is virtually non-existent here. Discussion and planning is key. If you have a wheat farm and that’s what a god wants, you can tell the players you will cover it. If you have some conquistadors near your settlement, you can trade for some goat horns to fight them off. If you’ve access to dung, you can declare you will burn it to help forecast the disasters in the next era. Yes, Tindaya is cooperative and not a game where one player removes autonomy from the others.
Most of the above will also be useful in the competitive game too and there is excellent tension here. Points are awarded for making offerings and battling conquistadors - players are rewarded for making positive contributions to the islands and islanders’ survival.
There is a further twist in the competitive game. There are a series of secret objectives for all players and players decide whether the ones they hold will be worth positive or negative points. These positive and negative points are drafted and allocated to the cards, so you know what yours will be worth, and may be rewarded for that achievement, but will you be stung for having the most of a resource due to another player’s card? This adds a dramatic bite of end game scoring that can impact the final standings significantly.
Setting up for Disaster.
As I mentioned, Tindaya is complex. This complexity does also manifest in setting up the game. In short, it is a lot.
Map tiles need laying out. Island tiles need laying on the map tiles. Resource tokens need placing on the island tiles. Various decks of cards need sorting and shuffling. Player boards and tokens need organising… it goes on.
Setting up ready to play my first game took around 45 minutes. It came down dramatically after that, once I knew which cards were which and had organised parts of the game to my liking, but it felt a lot for that first game.
I don’t comment on this to put you off, but you need to be aware of what you are getting into. This is not a case of shuffling a couple of decks and away you go, like in Pandemic.
Fortunately, I consider the gaming juice to be very much worth the setup and learning squeeze. Once you get into Tindaya, the game flows very nicely. The player boards guide players through their action options, the iconography is clear (once you get going) and the end of era sequence is clearly laid out.
This meant I found myself enjoying the challenge offered by the game each turn, without having to constantly reference the rulebook. The first play was a little lengthy and a little hard going, but once I’d done each action once, fought some conquistadors, made some offerings… I was confident in what I was doing.
End of an Era.
Tindaya is one of those games I feel glad to have played. In a world of Pandemic clones, worker placement galore, resource gathering, etc, etc, Tindaya does enough to stand out. This is a game that feels truly thematic and captures the essence of what it is all about. I want my tribe to survive. I feel pressured to do so, due to the unforgiving landscape.
Yes, it is complex. It has a substantial set up. It perhaps requires players of the right mindset for it to shine competitively. Yet it takes on the challenge of providing solo, cooperative and competitive gameplay and is broadly successful on all 3 counts, whilst remaining distinct and different enough from other games I’ve played.
If you enjoy heavier games with a strong theme and want to experience something very different from what else is out there, give Tindaya a look. The gods will be most pleased.
