Do Not Anger The Gods. Tindaya Game Review

 Tindaya is a cooperative survival game... but with a few unusual twists. Your task is to ensure that at the end of each era all tribes remain alive and do not meet the conditions of general defeat. In this case, there is a final calculation of victory points, which determines whether you won (in cooperative mode) or who exactly is the winner (in competitive mode).

WHERE ARE WE?

 Canary Islands, XV century. The Izegem tribes live quietly for themselves, farming, fishing and herding, traveling the ocean and learning new professions, carefully using the island's limited resources. Settlements grow into villages. The sage seeks new knowledge and tries to appease the gods. But their way of life is destroyed by the arrival of evil Spanish conquistadors, who kill the locals and seize the islands.

 There are 8 Canary Islands in total. Each island has a volcano, dense forests, a wide coast and high mountains. Perfect for growing crops, raising pigs, fishing or grazing goats. Build a new home for your expanding tribe and feed the new residents. Explore the islands and meet new people. Spanish conquistadors begin to populate beautiful islands and build fortresses.

TIME TO PLAN

 Your little tribe of 3 commoners and two nobles must plan their lives. The main thing for them is that the gods remain satisfied. Gods are capricious and only give certain types of food, animals or resources in each era. As an alternative, human sacrifices can be made; who would miss a few conquistadors? If the gods remain displeased, their level of anger will rise, promising cataclysms and even the complete destruction of the islands.

 Life in constant fear, survival - this is the essence of the game. Each member of the tribe must have food and shelter, but an excess is dangerous: excesses also anger the gods.

 Seers Tibiabin and Tamonante can come to the rescue. They reveal the future of Tindai: where the gods will arrange a cataclysm and in what way; at which islands will the ship of the conquistadors appear. At the beginning of each era, the sacred fire must be supported by gifts. But if they are not enough, you have a bleak future.

 Do not forget about the objectives of your missions and other tasks. It is necessary to plan ahead, but it will not be easy to live to the end of the era.

 The life of a villager is very simple: gather resources and produce goods. You have to take care of livestock, you have to trade with the tribes that visit you. Nobles are more intelligent and can travel between islands by canoe, founding new settlements and learning new trades. They also fight against uninvited guests - settlements of conquistadors who want to seize these lands. But the most difficult job is to go to the volcano and satisfy the gods.

 As you develop your trade, you will gain access to more advanced goods and weapons. It is necessary to look to the future and learn to survive. At the artisan market, you can buy an idol, a large vessel, or even walls. Idols give one-time bonuses (or a resource if broken). The walls protect against conquistadors and some cataclysms.

 Each player has a trade and tribe board. Goods and resources are represented by tokens that are placed on tablets. Cube = 1 action and cylinder = 1 action can be performed twice. Competent management of actions is the key to success. Keep in mind that the amount of raw materials and wild animals is limited, so it is not always profitable to squeeze all the juices.

THE END OF AN ERA

 At the end of each era, several events occur. First, people and animals reproduce: in all cells where there are 2 or more, new ones appear. Secondly, residents demand food and shelter. Do not anger the gods by leaving them to die. Even the gods hate excesses; do not make more food than necessary. Similarly with goods.

 If the gods have received the offering, the level of anger will decrease. Then the cataclysms begin. The higher the level of anger, the more calamities. With proper planning, everyone will survive, but islands can change. Conquistadors are also arriving: you will have to fight them. They occupy empty islands. If you survive, a new era will begin.

 At the end of the game, the victory conditions are tested: you must control the islands or the conquistadors will win. Actually, you had to keep an eye on it the whole game. Also, in this phase, it is checked whether the missions and other tasks of yours have been completed. And finally the victory points are counted, if it comes to that.

COOPERATIVE AND COMPETITIVE GAME MODES

 While survival is all about Tindaya, it doesn't feel like the competitive mode was added as an afterthought. In competitive mode, you have more food for thought. Secretly plan actions, take advantage of good moments to get software or minimize losses. You can focus too much on survival and forget about other tasks. However, this does not mean that the "Alliance" mode is easier; survival is not easy.

 Mechanically, Dominion mode features hidden challenges that players only see when they pick up the corresponding cards and then place them next to their tablet face down. During the game, players place plus and minus tokens on any cards, including those of others. If at the end you have completed your task, then you gain or lose as much as there are pluses and minuses on it.

COMPONENTS

 The base ocean tiles are thick and look very nice. Creating islands at the start of the game is very fun. There are different types of territory, you can't confuse them. Excellent two-layer tablets with informative icons. Meeples of residents and nobles are cute and do not get lost against the background of the islands. The design of the cards is also well thought out: the cute illustrations are easily distinguishable from each other. Otherwise, the components, including the cardboard tokens, are nothing special.

EXPERIENCE FROM THE GAME

 Roughly speaking, game moves can be divided into 2 parts:

1. Find out how the figures on the field will affect the game at the end of the round.
2. Act based on the information that will happen at the end of the round.

 And in the first part of the move, analysis paralysis awaits you. It gets easier after a few games, but before that we used to spend as much as 20 minutes in a 25-minute round analyzing what exactly would happen at the end of the round and how we should act. And only in the last 5 minutes they rearranged the figures.

 All this is not very interesting and not fan. Primarily due to randomness.

INFLUENCE OF RANDOM

 In Tindaya, almost all information is open for most of the round; players know what is on the field, what it will do, and how their actions will affect the outcome. At the start of a round, you draw a random card and roll dice to determine where the trouble will occur at the end of the round. And the difficulty of the current round (and the game as a whole) depends entirely on the location of these problems. If they are placed somewhere far from your settlements, they do not affect the game. While analyzing the situation on the field, you will often hear the comment in your mind: "This god is going to destroy the farms on the islands in a radius of ... hmm ... oh, there's nothing there, so you can safely ignore him." Imagine a game with gods, volcanoes and tsunamis where you can look at an approaching tsunami and say that I could just as well have left it in the box: zero impact on the game. God aimed for where a bunch of your terrified meeples had gathered? "Ah, this god kills goats, but I have a pig farm there, sneeze." As a result, there is no tension or sense of danger.

 Similarly with the conquistadors, who, according to the idea, pose a threat to your settlements. They can sleep far from you, and then you will have to think about how to get rid of them. Or they can sleep next to each other. You realize that they are going to attack your island, you make two weapons, and then you just do nothing: the conquistadors themselves rush to your daggers and commit suicide. Can you call your actions a smart move? No, the game basically played with itself, no decisions had to be made. Just stay where you are and the problem will take care of itself.

 Sometimes, by chance, you are surrounded by dangerous gods, conquistadors and a volcano. In that case, you just run away. You need to spend an action to move - and you are safe. Very disappointing. In the first 2-3 games, the changing field under the influence of eruptions and tsunamis, islands that rise and sink are very impressive. But the more you play, the clearer you understand that this is just a chain of random events, the consequences of which are not so difficult to avoid.

 Can Tindaya give you a real challenge? So; sometimes you are surrounded by troubles that you can't deal with. On the other hand, sometimes "trouble" helps you too. Let's say conquistadors settled on distant islands, then an eruption began and killed them. You didn't have to lift a finger; the randomness of the game has removed from your path the only obstacle on the way to the winning condition.

 There is also randomness on the resource tiles. Sometimes you find 2 trees and your neighbor finds 4. What awaits you on the next tile: 2 weapons or 3 stones? It's amazing that in a game where you can calculate everything that will happen at the end of a round, there is a random allocation of resources. In competitive mode it would drive me crazy. Your wood tile gave you 4 resources and me 2. An unfair advantage.

 There is also a deck of cards with potential bonuses. Sometimes they neutralize threats looming in front of you, sometimes their effect is irrelevant.

 The randomness of Tindaya is a huge distraction from the gameplay. In any round, you can find trouble-free, resource-rich tiles and cool bonus cards. Or spend a bunch of actions just to survive, find unnecessary resources and useless bonuses. The difficulty of the game in each round is completely random. A game where, depending on the layout of the round, the cool effects of gods, tsunamis and eruptions can simply be ignored is very disappointing.

 And the third round is one of the most disappointing co-op endings I've come across. Co-operatives are often criticized for the fact that when you confidently climb over the box, the tension disappears. Tindaya suffers from this disadvantage even more severely. As early as the third round layout stage, you can determine that god effects will not affect you, and tsunami and volcano effects can be avoided. So if you have a sufficient advantage over the conquistadors, then you can do nothing and immediately say: "We won."

CONCLUSIONS

 Tindaya was one of my most anticipated games of 2022. Cool components and setting really interested me. I expected a lot, but...

 The complexity of the game, which jumps wildly at the will of randomness, ruined many games for me. Absolutely ridiculous god effects, tsunamis, and eruptions happened every game. Having played half of the third round, we folded, perfectly understanding that victory was already guaranteed. Overall, Tindaya is a pleasure to watch; A bright colorful world lies before you. The ship of the conquistadors, volcanoes and gods - all this promises a fantastic experience. But the range of decisions made is limited, and you spend more time figuring out what will happen at the end of the round than figuring out what you should do.

EVALUATION OF THE GAME

 Solo: 5/10. Your tribe takes up little space on the field, so you'll often completely avoid trouble from gods, tsunamis, and volcanoes.

 Cooperative: 6/10. Trading goods adds a nice element of interaction, but does not eliminate the main flaw of the game - randomness.