If you feel you don’t have time to watch a two and a half hour video of some guy opening a board game, i don’t blame you. Halfway through the process, i felt i didn’t have time for it myself.

So let me summarize what happens in the video for you here to save you a bit of time.

Teotihuacan: Sh*tty of Gods

This product was the result of a Kickstarter campaign that’s typical of what we’re used to seeing by now: a publisher has a popular game that they release expansion after expansion for, and often, those expansions don’t fit in the base game box, so you wind up with 4-5 boxes for a single game cluttering up your Ikea kallax shelf.

Eventually, the company decides to do a big box product. They republish the base game and all its expansion content, sometimes with revised artwork and components (and hopefully with spelling and rules corrections for things they botched on the initial print run) and bundle it all up into one monolithic container.

Mindclash Games, with their Trickerion Collectors Edition, is a master class in how to do this mostly right: you hire insert designer GameTrayz to produce little vacuformed boxes that fit all of the components in snug little recess that make the game a delight to set up and put away (except for the Dawn of Technology expansion, which i suspect was developed during or after the involvement of Gametrayz, so the stuff frustratingly doesn’t quite fit).

The Trickerion Collector’s Edition: it’s like maaaaagic.

When you deem that Gametrayz takes too big a bite from your bottom line, you figure “how hard can it be?” and you release something like the Anachrony Infinity Box, with lower-quality trays that still do a fairly decent job at fitting everything.

The Anachrony Infinity Box: less good than the Trickerion Collector’s Edition, but still very good

But when you’re Board & Dice, a publisher with great games but who are infamous for releasing products with a million pieces and nothing but a handful of plastic baggies to sort it all out, you eye this whole big box approach jealously and think “if they did it, we can do it too!”

No, Board & Dice. You can’t do it. You need help.

Professional help.

A+ Components Tossed into a Crumpled Paper Bag

Despite their Kickstarter campaign pillow talk promising a “new, amazing box with a tailor-made insert to fit all the components perfectly,” what Board & Dice have actually delivered is essentially an empty cardboard box with more steps. It’s reminiscent of the Scythe Legendary Box from Stonemaier Games, which was a big, empty cardboard box that contained three smaller, empty cardboard boxes. This is that, except in plastic.

Why slosh all your pieces into one big loose cardboard box, when you can slosh them into three additional smaller loose cardboard boxes?

And it’s a shame, too. The components in the game all seem very well produced (24:11), with heat-transfered decals ironed on to the wood pieces that give them a nice pop of colour. The drawstring bags are attractive, and the technology tiles make a nice clacking sound when you pick them up in a handful.

The board is beautiful (20:40), with a nice spot colour treatment that makes the different activity areas around the rondel pop with shiny ink that might glint under your room’s overrhead lighting.

Give the board person a raise. Nicely done.

But you can see the moment my face starts to fall begining at around 1:12:51 in the video, when i realize that the “insert to fit all the components perfectly” is actually just a big plastic well that you’re supposed to stack all your components of different heights and shapes in like Animal Upon Animal except not very fun, with no dividers to speak of, and then pile other components on top of those (which you have to put in a plastic baggie anyway to keep them from going everywhere, because that’s how gravity works here on Earth), and then — as the final kick in the pants — stuff a fully loaded drawstring bag on top of that, which you have to massage to get all the wood pieces inside to lie flat. Which they wont.

“Just sprinkle these four components on top of these twelve components. (Also, you may not own all four of these components.)”

The Tech Tray Tragedy

The travesty continues with one of the topmost trays, where the publisher expects us to haphazardly stack a series of wooden technology tiles in order (there’s a little number in the corner of each one, with such serializations as “#1” and “#1 1/2.” Yet there is no #19.) Between each of these, an insert guide depicts five cardboard tiles. The idea is that you deal 6 random technology tiles out at the beginning of the game, along with a stack of cardboard tiles for each one. As players achieve the requirements on each tech tile, they take a cardboard duplicate to remind them of the new ability they’ve earned.

See any mention of tile numbers? i don’t. Yet it’s crucial to this whole slipshod storage concept.

One trouble with the guide’s suggested setup here (apart from not spelling out for new players like me that each wood tile should go in order, and that their matching cardboard versions should go in between) is that if you place all your wood and cardboard surrogate tiles in order like this, you can’t very well randomize 6 technology tiles. The ones you grab from the end of one stack will be tiles #1-#5 3/4 or whatever, and you’ll know it.  So the “correct” way to set this up is to stack all your cardboard tiles in order according to number, and then jumble up the wood tiles separately in their own little area. That way, you can grab 6 random wood tiles, and then sift through the numbererd, ordered cardboard dupes to pair them up.  (Big thanks to Guillaume Courtemanche AKA datajack on Board Game Geek for demystifying this for me in this thread, and doing B&D’s job for them.)

The Search for “Missing” Pieces

The other problem with the guide is that the campaign offered a fifth player expansion box as a separate purchase. i didn’t purchase it. And yet the guide acts like i have.

And instead of clearly delineating 5th player pieces, the guide just acts like they’re supposed to be in your massive box of collected bits and bobs. Numerous times throughout the unboxing, you see me wondering where the green player pieces are.

So when the guide depicts 5 technology tiles stacked between each wooden one, it actually means 4 tiles, unless you own the 5th player expansion.

When the guide depicts a nice, full component tray with five sets of player pieces, it actually means “and the green pieces, if you own them.”

But more egregiously, when the guide depicts a number of tiles and some sort of white die or cube, it means “these are actually part of the 5th player expansion you didn’t buy, but instead of indicating that, we’re going to make you go crazy thinking you’re missing something.”

The components i’ve circled here are only available in the 5th player expansion box that you may not have bought. How would you know that, especially as a new player? Answer: you wouldn’t.

i thought about how B&D could have rectified this. Just write “5th player expansion” next to anything that comes from that box. Ah, but that isn’t language independent, and they don’t want to pay for localization. Ok, fine – as a bare minimum, just put a dirt-cheap bloody asterisk next to any component that non-5th player expansion owners may not have. They might not know what that asterisk means, but it’ll tell them something’s up.  i can’t imagine how many emails B&D must be getting right now about players who are convinced their boxes are missing pieces.

Help us, Kurt Vonnegut’s butthole — you’re our only hope!

The Infernal Cardboard Resource Holder

One of the items that came in the box was a cardboard resource holder. i couldn’t remember what it was or why i bought it, but the campaign page informs me that i paid 5€ for it, which seems absurd now in the glaring light of day.

Because Board & Dice provided no assembly instructions for the thing, i spent a full half hour of the livestream trying to smash it together with my oafish Hulk hands. (1:52:23) The problem, ultimately, was that the artist decided to pattern the outside of each resource well with that resource’s colour, instead of the inside of each well like a sane person.  The overpriced tray now sits mangled on my shelf.

Just fifteen more agonizing minutes and i should have it…

Why on my shelf?  Because like all the other components in this product, it doesn’t fit inside the box. i thought i’d at least be able to replace my plastic vacuformed insert with the nicer printed cardboard one, but no – it needs to take up its own space on a shelf somewhere, gettin’ dusty. 

Add to that the fact that it’s constructed just like a laser cut wood insert: it presents hard right angles to the player, with no plastic molded “finger scoops” to make it easy to dig hard-edged wooden components out of it.  So this one’s almost entirely on me, not Board & Dice: stop buying stupid stuff, Ryan. You should have known better. Five euro for a tray you’ll never use and can’t store and has usability issues anyway. Sheesh.

Final Verdict

Before any wisenheimers pop on here and remind me that it’s still a great game, i’ll pull an Uno Reverse and remind that this product is as much about the storage solution as it is about the game itself. If you wanted to play Teotihuacan, you’d just buy Teotihuacan. It’s been available for years.

But when you shell out extra dough (including an extravagant amount for shipping) for a special box that purportedly holds all of the pieces “perfectly,” and that’s not what you get, i think it’s well reasonable to call the publisher out and demand better.

In summary, the components team on the Teotihuacan: Deluxe Master Set product, should be commended, while everyone on the insert team — for their false promises and blatant half-assery — should be exploded.

We’re going to need another insert team.

Get Your Own Copy of Teotihuacan: City of Gods

This was a Kickstarter campaign that ran a year ago, but companies usually print more boxes than they initially sell, so check the Board & Dice website if you want to snag one.  Most campaigns also offer retail buys, so check your Friendly Local Games Store to see if they participated (Board Game Bliss in Toronto regularly offers Kickstarter copies of games).

If you want to grab the original, base Teotihuacan game with no bells or whistles, shop for it on Amazon using the link below. Your price will remain the same, and we’ll pick up some referral pennies.