Mexica Board Game Review

Year Published: 2002

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 90 Minutes

Designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer are two of the more prolific designers in all of board gaming, and the two of them together have designed dozens of games. They consistently seem to churn out winners.

I mean winners in a literal sense. Mexica is a member of their “Mask Trilogy,” so-called for the giant masks on the box covers of the original edition. One other in the trilogy, Tikal, and the unofficial fourth member, Torres, both won the coveted Spiel des Jahres in back-to-back years in 1999 and 2000.

Each has some overlapping mechanical ideas in them. A set number of action points per round that are spent on one of a handful of possible actions, area majority contests on a central map, tactical planning in a shared and ever-changing spatial puzzle. If you like this style of gameplay, these are among the most stalwart examples of it in all of board gaming.

I’m here to make the case that Mexica is actually the best of them.

The first, and largest, caveat, is that I haven’t played the 4th member, Java (reimagined as Cuzco in a later edition). It’s supposedly the most complex of the four, though, which I don’t think does this style of gameplay any favors.

Rather, I see their strengths as the occasionally staggering freedom inherent in the games, the emergent interaction that occurs when the boards are fleshed out in interesting, unique ways, and the contentious tactical maelstrom that typifies good area majority games.

Mexica – The Premise

You’re building a city at the behest of the emperor. As an architect of the city, you’ve all been given mandates on districts to be built (via sectioning them off with water canals), then populating them to hoard the influence that they confer (by building your structures in the districts).

You’ll be moving about the area, placing canals, bridges, ziggurat structures, and mainly scoring points based on your influence in the various districts.

Area Majority, Area Control and Area Creation

Unlike El Grande, another classic co-designed by Wolfgang Kramer, the areas you’ll be fighting over are not predetermined. In Mexica, you’re constructing the areas you’ll be fighting over…and then fighting over them. Not directly fighting, but in the form of control via structures you’ve built.

This is the first major departure from many in the genre, and it affords players more freedom than they’re sometimes used to. The early game’s sprawling, barren map can be intimidating, but it’s also rife with possibility.

If this seems a touch abstract, it is, but the point is the tactical and strategic play. The city could be any city, and the theme could easily shift.

There’s also a line in the sand in such games between zero-sum control states and shared ones. In other words, can only one of us control an area? Or are points awarded for 2nd, 3rd? In Mexica it’s the latter. This is less punitive than some zero-sum games, but to say that Mexica can’t be brutal would be false. The opportunities to undercut opponents are numerous and varied, which we’ll talk about shortly.

The freedom is the beauty here, because there’s no set path to a win. There are “bad” decisions, certainly, but nothing like an optimal strategy since the shifting board state doesn’t allow for single, definite plans. Rather, it rewards adaptability.

Emergent Shenanigans

The maze-like spatial puzzle that will emerge by about the mid-game is the game’s other chief aesthetic and mechanical quality. Bridges will come and go, canals will section off previously accessible areas.

So you’re navigating this shared space as the maze shifts around you. And if you’re clever, you can shift it in ways that make things a pain in the butt for opponents.

Remove a bridge they needed to escape an area and they’ll need to spend action points to replace it. Or, better, construct a building where it blocks their movement, causing them to have to spend 5 of their turn’s 6 action points simply to teleport to another area of the map.

The subtly here can’t be overstated. Removing a bridge could be a hindrance, but placing one could be as well if it requires an extra movement point to navigate down a canal. Even simply placing canals in certain configurations can stymie a plan to found a particular high-scoring district

Sticking it to other players like this isn’t the point of the game (just a bonus! 🙂 ). But the point is that because you’re all shuffling about together, doing things that are good for you and bad for others aren’t mutually exclusive. Which necessitates creativity in how you view everyone’s positioning and objectives.

APs (Action Points) and AP (Analysis Paralysis)

AP is a common acronym for Action Points in games. And also for analysis paralysis, wherein players are stunned into protracted thought by the overwhelming number of options available to them. It’s a real thing.

Tikal is more frequently the recipient of this criticism. I don’t see it as a huge issue personally, but its 10 action points per turn give you an astounding number of things you could do. So which one should you do? Hard to say. I’ve heard of groups that play with a timer to mitigate the worst of the downtime that this can create.

Mexica’s 6 action points aren’t quite as bad (Torres features 5, for reference, and it’s likely the most accessible in this regard). But Mexica also does something clever: it lets you bank up to two of those points per turn, to use on future turns. And yes, this means that you might have a monolithic 12-action-point turn later in the game, but chances are when you do, it’s because you have a clear, definite need to utilize them.

This system mitigates the struggle of figuring out what to do with that last AP or two when you don’t have a great use for it and are scanning the board for better options. And in doing so, it effectively streamlines a mechanical system that is an occasional source of critical scrutiny in board games.

Sum of the Parts

There’s no single element in Mexica that is transcendent. But its parts flow together quite effortlessly. The tactical puzzle is one of the more broadly satisfying I’ve ever played because of the numerous smaller elements that all afford me chances for creativity, freedom and cleverness. Combining ideas involving the spatial maze, control elements and action point economy give you more to consider and do than the systems alone would imply, because their interrelation opens up new strategic and tactical avenues.

A friend once banked a massive number of action points, then sunk numerous plans (somewhat literally) in one gigantic turn as he placed something like 12 canal tiles to mess with our plans for controlling some large areas.

Sneaking a building into an area before it becomes a closed-off district, and thus eliminating the need to travel there later, is always a hilarious tactic, and an effective one.

Beginning to build in “open” space in order to create paranoia surrounding the scoring of those areas is an effective way to change everyone’s plans without interacting with their immediate plans, and it allows you to control aspects of the game flow that you wouldn’t have realized even existed before you discovered that tactic.

Examples like this are myriad, and they reveal a game that is expansive without being complicated, contentious without seeming petty, and blending strategic and tactical measures in roughly equal measure.

Tikal is the most thematic experience of the “Mask” games I’ve played from this designer duo. You’re hacking through the jungle, unearthing temples, and it truly feels like this. By comparison, the somewhat abstract spatial puzzle of Mexica may lose some gamers in translation. But Mexica’s emergent narrative at the table between players, for me, more than overcomes that lack of immediate thematic immersion.

The result is one of my favorite games, full stop, and one I doubt I’ll ever tire of exploring.