Build Your Snake – Review of the game “Coatl”

There is no doubt that board games are fun and educational. This time our knowledge will be enriched with the Aztec culture while creating  coatli . 

Long long time ago

Portal Games introduces us to many ancient cultures. Most of the titles inspired by the old days are big Euro games with many components and rules. Fortunately, the lighter family lineups also have their strong representation, which Coatl recently joined  . The title serpent is one of twenty symbols in the Aztec’s fortune-telling calendar. It is his likenesses that we must create during the game and score as high as possible for them.

Snake recipe

Setting up the game is pretty quick. Put a round board in the middle of the table and fill it with the parts of the torso, head and tails according to the markings. We put the remaining elements of the hose into appropriate bags. Each player receives a board and Sacrifice tokens of their color, one Temple card, and 3/4/5/6 Prophecy cards (from the first player). Divide the Temple deck into two face-up piles and place it in the center of the table. Next, lay out the six Prophecy cards and the rest as a pile.

During his turn, a player may perform one of three actions:
– Take a piece of a snake (head, tail or two torso pieces from one field) and place it on his own board;
– Take any number of Prophecies in your hand (face up or from the pile) up to the limit of 5 cards;
– Use any number of pieces from your board to arrange the snake.

The board with coatla elements  is  supplemented when there are no torso segments or tails and heads. Faceup Prophecy cards are replenished after each player turn in which at least one has been taken.

When creating a serpent, you can use any number of the following in random order: take a fragment and start a  coatla,  or add it to an existing one, and put a Prophecy card from your hand next to the unfinished serpent. Note that you can only have two unfinished sculptures, so you must complete at least one previous one to start building a third one.

Each snake can have up to 4 Prophecy cards assigned to it. The more times we meet a given requirement from the card, the more valuable our sculpture will be. When adding the last, closing   fragment, we can redeem one of the face-up Temple cards or the one in our hand. It always has two requirements, but one of them is enough. Once a snake is completed, no more cards can be added to it.

The game ends when one of the players builds three  coatle  or runs out of body segments. Then, depending on the circumstances of the end of the game, players repeat their turns and score points for the created snakes. The person with the highest score wins and becomes the Aztec High Priest.

Is it worth visiting the Aztecs?

Coatl  definitely hit my taste. He found a place on my shelf between two equally nice and good family games,  Reef  and  Calico . All three games are visually eye-catching, have simple but not trivial rules, and have more or less the same goal – to arrange components according to patterns. Coatl  is the most exotic of the trio, and in the difficulty ranking I would place him in between the mentioned titles. Reef  is the simplest and once scored on the board, it can be changed immediately, because it doesn’t matter in the rest of the game. In Calico, on the other hand,   we have less choice of actions, but when arranging the tiles, we have to think about more elements ahead. Coatl fits perfectly into these games as the third missing link.

The workmanship is very nice and colorful. The cards have repetitive illustrations and would look better if they were different, but don’t cheat. They do not matter and we stop paying attention to them during the first game. Only the order shown on them, the number of snake fragments and points count. A great way to do this is to place a pattern to the left of the Prophecy cards that you want to make. Thus, holding a few cards in our hand, we still see the conditions that our snakes should meet. They could only be a little thicker.

Of course, the body segments, the most conspicuous components, should also be mentioned. They fit well together, so they do not fall apart when moved thanks to the “hooks”. My inner child had the best fun recreating the snake’s movement across the table. You must try with the kids. Creative kids will surely find other uses for colorful  coats .

There is randomness in the game due to the Prophecies and Temples available. Other players can take the cards we have chosen and in our turn there will be nothing interesting for us. The same thing can happen with body segments. To get out of a hopeless situation, we have three Victim tokens that we can use instead of the standard actions. They allow you to choose specific fragments of the serpent from the bags, put out new Prophecies and take the Temple in your hand.

Coatl  does not give us the opportunity to disturb others. There are two situations in which we can slightly irritate our opponents. The first and quite obvious one is to take a card or body fragment, as mentioned above. The second is to create a third snake when we know others won’t be able to do it, and end the game. Only half the points are scored for incomplete sculptures, so this is a huge loss. You have to keep an eye on your board and the number of heads and tails so that you can finish your coatla in such a case  , even if not exactly as planned at the beginning.

We will not experience atmospheric gameplay either, because as you might expect from an abstract game, it simply won’t be like that. For me, this is not a minus, but a feature of this title. However, it is worth taking this into account if we are looking for a nice game and  Coatl  will tempt us with its performance, and we put the atmosphere over the mechanics.