Yesterday we had a playtest with Petri and AnttiT, who both study in TKK, which is located in Otaniemi. They are both very good at boardgames so it gave as a chance to see how well Cuzco lives up to the test. Well, they both had played the game earlier and AnttiT was already ready to purchase the game two years ago! But still, we had some recent modifications (how the royal orders are played, secret maps) that we wanted to test some more.

The game play

The game played out well. One strange thing happened: I and Petri had too much money throughout the game (later we discovered that one reason for that was that there were way too many gems in the exploring deck!). No one was willing to fight for provinces and everyone was peacefully boosting their productivity.. until the end of round three. AnttiT went to the Sacred Valley, found a temple, but hanging bridge made all his units go back to his capital. Next thing you know, Petri captures the temple and Cuzco at the same time. At this point he manages to get into a nice ten or so points lead and all of us others start planning ways to change that.

So, pretty much our last round was trying to beat Petri and we managed to so quite well. He was forced to leave the temple and Cuzco, couple of his settlements got pillaged and he was forced to place last in the area final area scoring. I was only one point after him when we entered the last Inca Offering phase. There Petri played wisely and passed, although he had six resource tiles. It was the right move, because then Antti did not want to put anything as well, for he would not get any points either and I would score two points. Petri and others scored the sell most gold point and he won with 20 vp’s. I and AnttiT finished with 18 vp’s (I winning the tie breaker with having 49 silver coins!) and Antti with 17 vp’s. The game was almost three hours long, but there was some downtime because of us taking our time. It happens easily when there are close calls and someone wants to optimize his move.

Recommended changes

Couple things that were discussed after the game:

a) I noticed that the exploring deck was unbalanced. Not that many action cards and plenty of gems and gold. It also was too small and had to be reshuffled too many times.

Our recommended solution: Fix the number of gems and gold and add another set of action cards.

b) Temples were deemed too risky compared to other artifacts. The fact that you can lose the two points instead of have one sure point means you have to defend those two points at all cost, and then you most likely miss out on other victory point generating things.

Our recommended solution: Make temples so that the founder gets a vp and the one holding it in the end of the game gets the other vp.

c) Hanging bridge was maybe a little too powerful.

Our recommended solution: Have it return only the conquistador and two of the soldiers, not all of the units.

d) The old excitement of going after the secret maps was pretty much gone. You could just go to one of the sacred valley provinces, which you almost always manage to do, and then find them one after the other.

Our recommended solution: The card will tell the sacred valley province that map can be used in so that you can’t “cash in” those in the same province.

Overall, we were very happy with the playtest.