The main part of the board however is reserved for a map of Europe with routes between the important cities of the Renaissance. Here we travel with our two pawns, a merchant and an architect to build up store houses and pillars in the cities and to take part in fairs that take place in four randomly chosen towns at the end of each round.

So, there are four rounds and in each round a player has three turns, altogether 12 actions per game. That doesn’t sound much, but there are a lot of bonus actions you can acquire during the game, e.g. the first player who chooses a die from a section of the action wheel gets one of these bonus tiles.

As said we begin with a roll of all dice each round. The players then alternately choose a die, take the resources provided by the die and perform the associated type of actions. The number of the die determines the number of resources you may take to your reserve. So, a high number is good for that purpose. The number of action points on the other hand is the result of 7 minus the value of the die, so a high number of the die is bad for the number of action points. Quite a hard decision you have to make…

Click on image to enlarge!

With the actions we can move our architect and merchant on the map. Besides the architect can build pillars in free spaces of some cities and the merchant can build up houses. Both are good for scoring reasons and the houses also serve us as bases when a fair takes place.

Other actions let us take and place characters and contracts from the marketplace to our personal boards. Personal boards are a good keyword, because there we do a lot of the scorings. All new tiles we acquire during the game are initially placed to a storeroom on our player boards. From there they can be used (bonus tiles) or moved (character and crest tiles) to six houses with 1-3 storeys each. A completed building sets free new houses that you can place on the general map again.

A similar effect has the completing of a contract (you just have to spend the resources depicted on the contract tile, because fulfilled contracts are placed on another section of the player boards where they set free new pillars.

Click on image to enlarge!

I hope you now have a rough idea what’s going on in Tiletum. There is more than one way to score in the game. And, because you never know what actions will be available in the next round, you regularly have to adjust your strategy. This makes the game very exciting and entertaining. Even if you’re behind the leading player you always have the feeling that you still have a chance and that your actions are lucrative.

In my opinion Tiletum is a worthy representative of the great T-series of Board and Dice. Maybe it is not the most impressive one (compared to the obelisk in Tekhenu or the pyramid in Teotihuacan). But it is definitely one of the easiest to grasp. On the one hand this is down to the excellent rules with many examples, on the other hand to the limited number of actions, notwithstanding that limited number of actions doesn’t mean that you have limited choices to make. Tiletum is just a perfectly designed game. An expert game with a short (80 min) game duration, not overloaded, but still with enough possibilities to choose different strategies and to calculate the best outcomes from your actions. A game that deserves our G@mebox Star!