Ahau: Rulers of Yucatán is an innovative Euro-Ameri hybrid board game for 1 to 5 players, combining classic elements of worker placement and resource management, simple combat, and an innovative new system for dual-engine building. Experience the challenges of leadership deep in the jungles of the ancient Yucatán Peninsula. Build and secure your legacy as a Maya ruler by expanding your lands, acquiring resources, and making the proper offerings to the ancient gods. Will your pyramid temple tell the tale of a great ruler? 👑
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
If you'd like to see the latest prototype in action, check out Grand Gamers Guild at booth #2310, run by Nick Sima and Marc Specter. We're excited to share that all game sessions have completely sold out! If you'd like to get a game in, check in with them at the booth to see if there are any last-minute openings.
If you are already making preparations for Essen, we can assure you that we'll be there with a fresh new copy of Ahau (perhaps even with a factory-grade preproduction copy!), also hosted by Grand Gamers Guild.
We have been busy with playtesting and fine-tuning the game, and proud to say that Ahau is finally nearing the end of its development cycle. We've appreciated all of your patience while we took a few extra weeks to ensure that you'll receive the best gameplay experience possible.
Shout out to Pedro Latro & crew, David Digby, Bernardo Rippe, Board Game Café Budapest, and the many many playtesters who participated in our sessions and helped to make the game better with their feedback!
Here are a couple of changes we'd like to highlight:
- The temple scoring has been moderated: the temples (and the god scoring tiles) give less Fame overall (victory points) making the game much tighter, and therefore more exciting for everyone.
- If you lose a conflict, you would not only need to relocate into an adjacent region, but you cannot place any worker next to the region you were kicked out from. This enhances the original vision that players are essentially fighting for worker zones.
- We finally found the best powers for all the gods in the game. Balancing the god powers was definitely the hardest part, but also the most enjoyable and important part of the process. Here is a brief summary:
- The building tile offer has also been tweaked a bit: we introduced a river mechanic whereby the leftmost building tile will always be discounted, but you can gain Fame for buying buildings upstream of the river. At the round's end, the leftmost tile will get discarded (to create some even more turn order angst), all tiles slide to left and any empty slots are filled up. Here is a screenshot from Tabletop Simulator:
- The rewards of the B side of the player board have been changed considerably to make playing it almost a completely different experience. For instance, using the B side, you can grab your role card earlier, but you'll be able to advance on the Might track more frequently by constructing buildings.
- The war track has been renamed as might track and made longer with various rewards. There are also more ways to climb it.
- We removed a spot from the calendar on the 4-5 player side of the game board to make the game a tad shorter at those player counts.
- We added even more types of buildings and new building illustrations to the mix, to give a wider variety of options and represent the most important architectural structures of the Classic Period.
- We added 5 extra building tiles for the 5-player game that will be copies of existing tiles. The total building tile count thus will be 25.
- Even more tweaking of the Eclipse expansion. The extra set of role cards and event cards increase the replay value and interaction during the game even more. For instance, the Sajal role card lets you claim resources /tiles from other players in exchange for letting them place their workers next to your ruler. (The Sajal is a subsidiary noble who serves an Ajaw (king) at a large dynastic city.)
- The expansion will include 3 different sets of special pyramid tiles, one showing an arrow will duplicate a god in your pyramid temple to where it is pointing, the second type can be discarded as a resource, and the third one will give 4 Fame when built in. Due to the rarity and great value of these tiles, there will be even more competition for regions containing them.
- Ahau Junior has been aptly renamed Ahau Family, as we figured that the game still needs an adult to run it, but with the simplifications made, it can be an enjoyable experience for those too who prefer lighter games.
- We are still running multiplayer and solo tests, but right now we need more volunteers to test the solo version. If you are up for the challenge to beat King Pakal the Great on ever-increasing difficulty levels, join our discord server here!
- The rulebook of the main game has been finalised and edited by Chris Spath. You can check the draft here. This will be now transferred to the Indesign file by our graphic design team, and we'll have a great-looking pdf version again soon.
- You can check out the expansion rulebook here (also finalised) and its BGG page by clicking here.
- We have made arrangements to translate the rulebooks and the player aids into Spanish, German, French, and Hungarian.
- The booklet has been finalised by our team of consultants led by David Anderson and Josh Schnell. You can view the draft here. This will be also turned into a pdf.
- We improved the 3D pyramids a bit to make them easier to assemble and view: the god faces will be painted on the sides and the god scoring tiles will be placed on the top of the pyramid. (Previously the god faces would have been a separate component placed on top.)
- The player board has also been finalised: now we have a weapon track to count and store your weapons, which will also be a good visual reminder of what your right-hand card does (since the weapons and the right-hand card add up the military strength for conflicts). Each ruler and their glyphs have been placed on the left side of the board, also as a visual reminder that your ruler goes to the region indicated by the left-hand card you played this round.
Based on your overwhelming feedback here on Kickstarter and elsewhere, here are all the custom shapes for the wooden components of the game:
We are happy to announce that we'll upgrade the custom inlay to a custom insert to ensure even safer and neater storing of all of the components.
We are also considering adding an AI board for all of your solo gamers out there. One side of the AI board will be harder to beat, and if we account for the already existing three difficulty levels, this means the solo game mode will have essentially six difficulty levels (on top of the 6 different AI personalities), for even more solo gaming goodness.
We plan to close Backerkit in mid-September 2022. We will make an announcement in August about the foreseeable shipment fees to ensure that everyone can prepare in advance.
Considering all of the above, everything seems to fall in place to gear up for manufacturing. We are in active talks with manufacturers and will make our selection in August and let you know. We'll also announce our fulfillment partner in August. All of our partners will be professional companies with a proven track record to make sure to provide you with the best quality possible.
Future Rulers,
As we are heading into the summer, we have a couple of exciting updates to share on how the project is progressing.
All art assets for the game (including both the base game and expansion) are complete. Feast your eyes upon the new building illustrations made by Dávid Szabó!
Each and every piece of art has been double-checked by our team of cultural consultants, including David S. Anderson, Josh Schnell, and Walter Paz Joj. That means that the illustrations you can see in the game truthfully represent both the magnificence and reality of the Classic Period of the Maya, and very little was left to the imagination.
The graphic design team will complete the circle by putting all the art in its proper places, and we'll import everything into Tabletop Simulator, so you can play the game with the gorgeous new art. Not only that, but we'll get a few more prototypes printed for blind playtesting and demoing at various conventions. This leads us to our next point...
You heard that right, Ahau will be demoed at the biggest board gaming conventions within the US, courtesy of Marc Specter from Grand Gamers Guild and his GMs.
- Origins Games Fair will happen in Ohio between 8-12 June.
- Gencon will go down between 4-7 August.
We'll post more details about the location once they are revealed to us.
... is ongoing with various groups and individuals, and this will continue over the summer. Things are shaping up nicely, and we are putting on the finishing touches. In case you would like to get involved in this process and be credited in the rulebook for your efforts, please apply here.
The rulebook has been handed off to Chris Spath from the UK for final editing. Chris worked on, among others, the revised rulebook of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, Tokyo Metro, Mini Express, and Railroad Revolution. This work will be finished over the course of next week, and we'll update the pdf rulebook soon after that. You can view the text-only rulebook here and make your comments directly there or message us privately if you'd like.
The first playtest of Ahau Junior went phenomenally well, with 2 kids aged 8 (boy) and 9 (girl). Both really liked the game, and could easily understand the rules.
A summary of the main differences vs the main game:
- No role cards, no building tiles, no discarding to boost god summoning, and some minor changes to god powers.
- The personal scoring variant is used and the god scoring tiles are assigned to specific gods harmonising with their power, rather than randomly distributing them.
- Bonus wild tiles giving 5 Fame when built-in are placed into regions instead of the building tiles and claimed similarly.
Otherwise, the game has the same ruleset!
We consider using the "Junior" version as a tutorial mode for people learning the game.
Since the Backerkit store opened a few weeks ago, we surpassed 100,000 $ in sales! If we keep up this rate, we'll be able to unlock our next stretch goal, so stay tuned.
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Do you have any questions about our progress? Let us know in the comments below.
SMOKE TEST FOR PLEDGE MANAGER
Good news, future rulers. Our pledge manager for Ahau has been approved by Backerkit, and we just sent out a message to 5% of our backers to perform a so-called smoke test. If you got this message, we would greatly appreciate any feedback you have on the experience. Once the smoke test is over and we are sure that there are no issues, we will open the pledge manager to everyone! If you do not receive a message by Monday, please reach out to us via DM.
Graphic Design & Illustration
After taking a much-needed rest, testing and development of the game are now continuing with our full effort.
Regarding the new illustrations, next on our list are:
The graphic design to-do list is similarly hefty, starting with improving the iconography, creating the icons for the Eclipse cards, the new god scoring tiles, the new building tiles, etc.
Now that we have finalized these lists, the art team is off to the races!
Gameplay Development
We have already made some substantive changes, for example:
We will be updating the TTS mod once the tests confirm these changes. Here is a screenshot of a recent test where the beige player won by a single point - a proof that nerfing the gods and creating fewer victory points will lead to even tighter gameplay.
Just for fun, here is a throwback virtual tabletop image from a test that happened more than a year ago, where there was even a sideboard named "The Jungle Path":
CUSTOM SHAPED RESOURCES - CONTINUED
Let's vote on the two remaining custom-shaped resources: obsidian and limestone.
Let us know in the comments below which one you prefer.
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LEGACY OF THRACKS - A GAME OF TRULY EPIC SIZE
Finally, let us recommend you a very cool game that is reaching its final hours on Kickstarter: Legacy of Thracks! This game is an asymmetric competitive strategy game for 1-4 players with special semi-coop elements, a mix of Ameri sandbox adventure and clever Euro resource management. It comes with a complete background story of all the characters.
Balázs Svéda, the designer and self-publisher has been relentlessly building this game for over 7 years, and the game is not only a true epic, a love letter to the genre, but also very unique. Real passion.
Also, all stretch goals have been unlocked. The solo mode was designed by David Turczi. You have only 9 days to unlock the magical barriers and enter the legendary city Dimara. Or control the Shadow and prevent others from reaching Dimara. Last chance to get your copy!
Future Rulers,
Many thanks again for your support during the campaign, and for making this a reality. With over 1500 backers from 47 different countries, including 40 retailers, Ahau is off to a really good start! This will give us the resources to ensure we can deliver the best possible game to you.
We'd like to give you a brief status update on the project. In the coming weeks, we plan to:
- Open your Pledge Manager on Backerkit
- Work out the final details with our selected shipping and manufacturing partners.
- Continue testing and fine-tuning the game, with special regard to the expansion and new game modes (Ahau Junior and the Ahau Shadow Player Variant)
- Finalise the rulebook and the booklet so that the translations of the language editions can be finalised or made from scratch.
- Finish updating the last of our art assets
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Speaking of art assets, the last batch of Eclipse cards have been finished by Gergő Kovács in collaboration with Dávid Szabó, our main illustrator. Join us for their grand debut!
One card in the middle is called the "Volcano Eruption'. Sound familiar? This card was suggested in the comments on one of our previous updates. Just a sign that we walk our talk and are happy to involve backers in our creation process.
The illustration of the card at the bottom is named "The Might of Teotihuacan", which pays homage to this great culture that was not only the rival of the Maya civilization in its time but also had a great influence on it. So, here is a bit of background historical information!
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THE MIGHT OF TEOTIHUACAN
In 378 CE, strangers arrived at the great Maya kingdom of Tikal and took control of the city. That very same day, the current king of Tikal was executed and a year later the foreign regime established a new dynastic line by installing a new ruler who shared their bloodline. Later monuments describing and depicting the tumultuous event would show the foreigners and Tikal’s new king in the characteristic regalia of warriors from the mighty city of Teotihuacan, located far to the west in Central Mexico.
The host from Teotihuacan was led by a man called Siyaj K’ahk’ (Fire is Born) by the Maya, who was a subordinate noble to the then-ruler of Teotihuacan known only as Spearthrower Owl. Tikal’s current ruler, Chak Tok Ich’aak I, was killed on that fateful day and in 379 CE, Yax Nuun Ahiin I was installed as the city’s ruler. It is widely believed that Yax Nuun Ahiin was the son of Spearthrower Owl, Teotihuacan’s ruler. Over the next two centuries, Tikal’s fortunes would be intertwined with Teotihuacan’s, declining around the mid-sixth century alongside the decline of Teotihuacan and the rise of the Kaan kingdom at Dzibanche, later moved to Calakmul. However, these events marked a cultural shift in the Maya region with a diffusion of Teotihuacano art style, architectural forms, and military equipment throughout the southern Maya lowlands, centered at Tikal.
Can you guess what this card will do?