Episode 246: Tiletum

Tiletum is a 1-4 player game designed by Simone Luciani, and Daniele Tascini and published by Board and Dice.

In Tiletum you and fellow players take on the roles of rich merchants traveling throughout Europe during the Golden Age of the Renaissance. You are collecting contracts and coats of arms, gaining favor with nobles, and helping with the construction of cathedrals. What you are actually doing is running around a board collecting resources to do all manner of things by drafting dual function dice.

Each round an amount of dice are rolled and placed around an ACTION WHEEL. The selection of these dice is the meat of the game as players will be selecting dice from this wheel during their turns. There are six different actions in the game. The wheel itself tells you what value die will be place at each action. Every round this rotates. Not only does each die chosen represent an amount of resources the player gets, but also the amount of action points the player can spend on that action. The more resources a player gets the less actions points.

For example, this round all 5s rolled are place on the architect action. A player choses the blue 5 die, that gets me 5 iron because it was a blue die and 2 architect action points. Conversely, if two were there instead, I would get 2 iron, and 5 action points.

Now there are 6 actions in the game.

The architect action lets you more your architect around the board, place a pillar (which allow you to build a cathedral for points) or claim a bonus tile. Bonus tiles give you resources and additional action points. Bonus tiles can also give players coats of arms, which when played on your player board get you a one time bonus action.

The merchant action, lets you move your merchant around the board, place a house on the board (for end game points), and take one of those bonus tiles.

The character action, lets a player select a character and either put it into their storehouse and move it from their storehouse to their player board. Now their are some rules about how to do this, but just know when you do it, it gets you a bunch of actions, resources and points. There is a bit of a set collection to this. Getting the right characters and coats of arms together can get players some points end game.

The contract action, lets you selection a contract or exchange some resources. These contracts, can get a player big points. The king action will move players on a track. This can earn or lose points for players and determine player order. Finally there is a joker action, that let players do any of the other 5 actions.

Now there are 4 rounds in a game and there is scoring at the end of each round based on some objectives. There is also some end game scoring that can be big. At the end of the game, whoever has the most points is….the winner.