In Tikal the players lead an archaeological exploration into the Mayan jungle in search of treasures and temples. But you will need to protect your discoveries from the rival expeditions. So how does the game play?

Well, everyone starts at base camp and slowly explores the unknown jungle. This exploration is represented by a hex tile, which is drawn at the start of each player’s turn and is laid on the board by the player. Each hex side is impassable unless a stepping stone or stones is showing. The number of stepping-stones indicates the cost for an archeologist to cross that hex side. Hence the players need to place their hexes to minimise the cost of movement for their team whilst attempting to block the opponents. The hex tiles are drawn from a shuffled, but pre-layered pile, which controls the appearance of the best temples to the later stages of the game. Each tile may be clear terrain, it may hold a burial site where valuable artifacts can be dug up, it may be a temple site, which can be excavated to increase its value, or it could be a volcano, which triggers a scoring round. This tile laying system gives a good sense of exploring the deep jungle and each game the network of paths that is created will be totally different.

Having placed your tile the players control individual archeologists who can move about, dig up artifacts, excavate temple sites, build new camps, secure victory points and even fight. Every turn a player can spend ten action points and there are never enough to do all that you wish to, so that prioritising is crucial.

There are two methods of acquiring victory points, you can concentrate on collecting sets of artifacts or, alternatively, controlling the big value temples due to endeavor or theft. The accepted tactics so far are probably a mix of both.

Is Tikal a good game? Undoubtedly yes but not one of the greats. Apart from superb graphics, it has a quality blend of theme and mechanics. There is an appreciable level of decision making and skill required to win. The game can be tense as the players compete for the treasures or the most valuable ruins. Also it’s rules are simple enough for my seven year old son to play.

On the downside, it’s not a quick game and can be prone to excessive analysis on each move. If four players are playing there can appear to be large periods of inactivity. So a time limit on a players move has been suggested in the group I play with.

Is it worth having in your collection – I believe so, and the kids seem to love it.

So for my vote it gets an 8 out of 10.