Tectonia Board Game - One Round Playthrough

and there we have it my warriors are even more powerful than before sounds so scary i have to do something hi everyone it's taryn and stella here from meeple university thanks for joining us today we'll be playing to a round of tectonia and teaching it as we play stay tuned [Music] let's play techtonia game designed by haagen-bear if you find value from this video later please hit the like button subscribe to us hit the bell and leave your feedback in the comments for now let's get to the table alright here we are for our one round playthrough of techtonia and specifically we're going to be playing the second round of this game here so what you'll see on the board is not set up we've done a bit of spread around the board this is an asymmetrical um an asymmetrical war game with both tactical and strategic elements to it with a bit of ancient building indeed now what is going on here so this is the world it's made up of all of these tiles and it is a shifting world that's why it's called tectonia grassland it's mostly grassland but that grassland can sink into the water or it can build up into the mountains which produce iron and that's a that's one of the major parts of this game is that you can make the board fit your strategy and your tactics but it's also going to be shifting around randomly without you so battling each other and battling the board um now we are set up one thing we will clarify here we are set up as if it is a three player game but we're playing with two players and what what it means to be set up with three players is that the sectors on the edge of the board sorry the areas on the edges of the board aren't there so it makes the board a little bit smaller this game is not designed for two players it's a three or four player game and so the board will look quite empty as we play at two but don't worry about that you'll be playing with three or four when you have this game it's just that there's only two of us and so we're going to use two to show all of the mechanisms we have unique factions so i am the north warriors they tend to be a bit slow their warriors are a bit expensive but they attack hard they have more attack symbols and they deal more hits than the other factions then me i am not as strong as tarrant but mine is tend to be cheaper and i can probably move more agile and i can group like more of us basically yes you are the wood warriors and you have the ability to exceed the capacity of an area by one unit you'll see there's a capacity number on each of these so we are limited to how many units can be in a certain area indeed all right so the game is what we'll do before we start taking actions is we'll do this round's set up for terraforming of the world so we're going to draw random cards out of here these represent the different areas we're going to do this three times we're going to draw one card which tells us which area is going to move and then another card which tells us whether it's going to go up or down so here we have area 12 this one up here it's currently grassland grassland is going to go to water so after this round is done this land is going to sink and it's really going to separate east from west it's not going to be many ways across this is the only way yes the second we've got area 39 that's this one over here it's already water so the only thing that can happen to it is it becomes grassland so let's put it up here we're going to get a bit more land over in here finally we have area 50 which is down here and that is grassland at the moment it's going to become mountain so as we mentioned before it'll actually put a few mountains down here mountains produce iron uh everything else produces enemy enemy and energy which is the main thing you'll be spending the game but you need iron for some of the stronger units and so that's why you might want to control the iron fortunately none of us are at risk none of our areas where our units are have have are going down that's one of the big things to watch out for your units can just get sunk into the ocean good thing is that that happens and it doesn't happen until the end of the round so you still have time to plan to move your units away from that land that you're thinking yes all right so now i'm the first player in this round and we will have four actions each per round and we've got seven action cards in our hands and on each turn we will play one of these action cards and resolve the action on it so i won't go through what they are now you will see them all as we go through this play last thing we need to describe before we get into the game is what are we trying to do how do we win so this is a it's a tactical game uh in three players we would play nine rounds and we will be trying to meet the goals on our different goal cards when i say different we each have the same set of gold cards but they represent different different areas to control so for example this one here wants you to control three out of these four central areas which are split across the different sectors of the board this one wants you to win a big battle five units on each side so that's a that's just a battle type of one this one is to take over someone else's headquarters so we've got our headquarters on the board control every land territory in one of the colored sectors of the board so different things like that we have four color sectors on the board yes and that will become important as well we've got the orange sector here the brown sector the blue sector and the gray sector and several actions are limited to a single sector as we'll see all right i am i am knowing i've consolidated in round one so i've built up a few units here you've built a lot of units and spread so we're in very different positions at the moment and with that i'll go into my first action so i am going to play this one this is move move all and attack one so i can pick a single sector where i have units i can move any or all of my units in that sector and then i can attack one destination area so what i'm going to do i'm going to move from the gray sector and i want to move out over here a couple of reasons for that one of those objectives i showed you before was controlling these areas so if i can beat you in battle here that's good for me i will get a point there's also one of my goal markers over here so eventually i need to come over here and control this area to get a point there so it makes sense for me to progress in this direction these goal markers are being placed by your opponents by the way so i place that for you you place my goal markers for me in the most inconvenient location yes all right all my units move two they have a maximum range of two at the moment so i've got mostly warriors i'm going to move a warrior in there i'm going to move a warrior in there warrior one two i'm going to move an archer down here but i still need to control this territory so i'm going to leave a couple of warriors there archers can support from from an adjacent area so that's why i'm bringing a couple of arches down here although at the moment i can only support with one i still need them kind of spread out actually no i'm i'm not going to move that archer i'm going to leave that archer there i do want spread for support i think all right so now my movement is complete and i'm going to launch a battle here launch launch my attack so let's see how this works i have four warriors so i get four of my warrior dice my warrior dice are different to stellars they're both red at the moment mine are different they will i'm sure be more distinguishable in the final version okay i can also use my one archer to support so i get one archer die you have only two warriors in the battle so you get two warrior dice and i don't have any archers correct okay now we roll okay so these are the symbols that we've rolled um the first thing we resolve is panic but no one has any units that are all panic the next symbols we resolve are reinforcements so each of us has the opportunity to reinforce this battle with an adjacent unit i don't have any adjacent units who can come in because this guy's already fired his arrows he's not valid to reinforce so i've got no one a jason can come in so this is just a wasted symbol all right i'm not going to bring my warrior into the battle i'm going to lose any way i think yes i am in a stronger position at the moment i've rolled a couple of hits you have not so bringing units into the battle just looking for troubles it may just be looking for trouble okay so that phase is now done alright next we can influence the battle with our battle cards so each of us has a level one battle card corresponding to each of our unit types for each unit type in the battle we can play that card up to a maximum of two cards per battle each of us has only warriors in this battle my supporting archer doesn't count so attacker then defender where it matters we will play these cards and resolve their effects so this is mine my warriors card cancels one of your retreat symbols and cancels one of your shield symbols so we'll resolve that when we get to those symbols yours allows you to either retreat a unit or reinforce the battle all right i'll choose to add a retreat symbol then okay we both can't play any more battle cards so that phase is over and now we do the retreats phase so at this point we can retreat one unit per retreat symbol rolled or gained off a card now you gained one off the card but i cancelled that one with my card so you can't retreat i thought i'd just give it a go anyway see if you'll forget the cancel now for me i've got two retreats which would allow me to take those warriors back where they started i also rolled a retreat on my support archer but that one doesn't count the only symbol that counts when an archer is firing in from adjacent is the bow and arrow naturally so ignore this one i could retreat two of my units but i don't think i want to i'm spreading this way if i went back i would just be retreating from what i'm trying to do so i will ignore my retreats as well now we resolve hits so i roll two hits i roll zero and then you cancel my you have one shield which i cancel so both of my hits count both of your warriors are defeated going to valhalla yes and at this point we check to see who won the battle and the winner is whoever has the most units left in the area which is of course me four to zero tyres would go with the defender so by winning the battle as a reward i gain a conquest card it's actually just one of the terraforming cards that we saw before but this is something that i can cash in for upgrades which i will show you shortly so i've got a conquest card now the last thing as part of winning this battle is that i now control three out of the four areas in the middle that i was talking about before so as you can see here i've got one two three and the fourth one is in the ocean at the moment so that allows me to complete my first goal card here take three out of four of those areas so there we go i've got a victory point well done winning oh you are winning i'll pop that off to the side but i have a point and that is the end of the battle and the end of my turn so we pick back up our cards they go back into our hands ready for the next battle that card is done and it's your turn all right i think i will do this one first okay so this is the collect card yes so how you how you collect is you pick one of the colored sectors you pick three areas you control in that sector and you gain the resources that are there this is the only way in the game to get iron all right clearly i want to pick the gray area because i have only at least thanks to taryn so with the three areas i'll pick this one to get two ions so this is another counter to keep my iron so of course this is the prototype it looks the same as the energy and then the other one is five which is this one five energy and this one or this one doesn't really matter for two energies of seven energy all up so one two three four five six seven very good so the major thing you're going to be spending energy on is units and ion is on the stronger units which at the moment you can't uh at the moment you can't hire recruit the the bigger units because you don't have the building you would need so the other the second part of this action is if i have two conquest cards and i can cash in for five energy but i don't have any of these cards so i don't do any of those that's it that's my turn okay my turn i am going to play this card here and do some upgrading so i am going to use this is the other way i can use my conquest card i can spend three energy and return my conquest card so i'll just shuffle that back into the deck and that is going to let me upgrade one of my battle cards from level one to level two so we saw what my warrior does before cancels a retreat and cancels a shield if i were to upgrade that it would also let me re-roll one of my warrior dice so that's pretty cool um with my archer at the moment my archer if it's in the battle can do a reinforcement and an extra arch or die roll it's actually pretty strong if it's in the battle not just standing on the sides attacking if i upgrade the uh the archer i also get a retreat and i can support two archers into a battle instead of just one so i've got a couple of options there but i'm strong with warriors i think i'm gonna upgrade my warriors so level two card goes in my hand level one card out of the game and there we have it my warriors are even more powerful than before sounds so scary i have to do something this is my turn now so i will want to upgrade i mean build a building i should say so i can recruit more fighters to fight for me to fight against your evil warriors just opposing warriors [Music] so the way yeah so the way the buildings work in the game the only building that goes on the map is your headquarters which are in those two places for us when you construct another building it goes onto your player board and unlocks one of your unit types so i unlock the archer type in round one stella unlocked uh the smithy to gain shield bearers the more defensive unit indeed now that you're level one you can build level two and given all that iron you've got i suspect that's what you might be doing yeah i will build this sacred place might as well i've got the iron resource i might as well trying to build or recruit this you know groot look alike creature which is really cool and i pay the cost of billing which is three three energy one two three it's not that expensive but it does take your whole turn to do yeah that's it so the sacred place enables the monsters to come into the game monsters tend to be slow but powerful so your wood monster is now available alrighty i am now going to uh recruit some units i need to build back up i didn't lose anything in the battle but i need to build up so all of my available units cost me three energy each i have 16 energy at the moment so i can get at most five units and i can put them where i have units so i'm going to get the maximum amount i'm going to gain five units um i think i will take an archer here this one's now at capacity uh it can only hold four units i'm going to put an archer here for two three is a warrior here four is a warrior here [Music] and five is an archer here so i'm defending this sort of area here so it's part of the part of the difficulty of not having that many areas is that i do have to clump them together before i move them out but i've got a good defensive hold here and lots of units here to spread out all right back to me yep i will do this action which is a recruit now i am recruiting as well now we talk about well we seen i feel the second place hence i want to recruit the three monsters so i want to get no it's like it's really friendly three person like yours looks scary yeah anyways so it costs four and one or here as well four and one iron so four energies in one iron so that's eight of these two of these with my irons back to zero and i would put these where i've got my units which i will put it i'll put it here yep okay oh yeah just so that so we can see that i got and now i'm gonna open up half more warriors now my faction can exceed the capacity limit so i can add one more warrior which i will my warrior only with um it cost me two so talking about cheaper so two energy and then i'll put a warrior here and guess what i'm gonna recruit another warrior so it cost me two energy and i will put it here i'm gonna try to expand that way i'm gonna try to control the gray area speaking about controlling and like expanding i want to put more here so that's my goal marker so i'm gonna also reach that way so i'll get one shield bearer over here that's slightly more expensive um it is four three oh sorry uh no four no four one two three four and i got more warriors even more warriors over there so one two let's see one two one two and i think i can put one more there one two well i still have three so technically i can do one more which i will might as well want to and that's it that is all my recruiting i'm broke as a one energy faction broke so as you can see as if you've got a good spread over the board which will let you build up a lot of energy you can get a lot of units out there quickly um this is a game with sort of rapid recruitment and and it's got wrappings around the board we're both in a position where we can't now take an action another action that costs energy as you saw there are a few it costs you three energy to do a building and we do actually have two move and attack cards in our hand but one of the second one costs four energy so if you want to move an attack twice in a round you need to have four spare energy to do that expensive all right what's your what's your turn turret i must say i don't like uh i don't like this i feel like i'm in danger i don't know so what i say that we uh like my warriors are cheaper than yours my warriors are cheaper than yours you're too expensive mine it's so cheap so we almost show you all of the action types here there is i believe one more that we haven't shown yes and i do want to do it and i realize that i can't afford it i have uh not kept enough energy in the bank for all of what i just described for the sake of so everyone can see how it works let's just pretend you don't recruit this archer for example and then um yeah yeah let's uh let's uh play the generous game and pretend i didn't recruit that archer so you have four energy left and now you can telephone it cost you yes it costs me two energies so this cost me two energy and i get to terraform an area of my choice so this can either be an area that i'm on or an adjacent area that is empty and what i want to do i showed you before how i i got three of those four areas there is a separate gold card to have all four of those areas here it is and i can't get that while it's in the ocean so i am going to pop that there and i am going to bring it up and hopefully i'm going to defend whatever is going on here um and have a chance to actually claim it but if i don't defend here this is my only real chance i think so i've got to make that happen so i pop that there and you'll see how that works after the round ends and that is my four actions for the rounds so my round is done all right my last turn of the round my fourth one is to move an attack as we see before battle we start with battle we close with battle i can only sorry i can also move anything in grey so with this i i mean in one area which i choose gray and sector sector sorry i will move one warrior here and i will move now what my warrior i will just open up the cards so my warrior has two movement as indicated in this top card so one two hello one two oops upside down one two one two i'm gonna try to attack this area because this is taran's headquarter it's it's going to be a little bit inconvenient if you are attacking your enemies headquarter and then and there's also a goal card for doing so that's correct so my shield bearer also has two movement here and yes that's one point if i can do that and my monster tree only move one inch i'm going to just leave it here so those are adjacent they are still they could reinforce they could come into the battle they could all right so let's battle oh actually i will move this one here to defend this space and you know retreating purposes as well and the warriors i will move one two because my faction can exceed one than the capacity of two all right that's it okay so now it's time for battles so this is this is a higher complexity battle there's a lot more unit types in the battle [Music] this is how all right so this is how it works first let's gather the dice for who's already in the battle so i've got two warriors oops i have four you've got the fence i have two arches yep you have a shield bearer which is the yellow dye sorry i just like looking at which one yeah oh yeah yeah that's the one okay i can support the battle with this archer so that gives me an extra archer but i will have to roll that one separately because this archer my archers actually have axes on them but this one is only supporting then i have an extra special defense when my headquarters is attacked so i can have two warriors or two shield bearers if i had the right building which i don't and these two warriors they add their dice but they're temporary warriors so they i'm gonna put them on the headquarters marker there they will disappear after the fight is done cool okay so now now we're ready so let me roll my dice i'll roll these separate and i'll roll this one here all right i've got two chops chop chops and two shields and one of these one of these reinforcements all right so now once again we will first resolve panic which no one has then we resolve reinforcement so you reinforce first you have one reinforced symbol yeah hello all right and with that you roll a die for that monster so that's the black dice and here we go and that's a panic oh that's good food good for you bad for me i've seen your tree monster oh yes yes yes sorry karen so the panic means one of my units runs away from the battle to an adjacent area and then i have to remove its die from the battle sorry taran now even more problematic for me uh the only adjacent area is at capacity so i don't have a place i can validly run so the unit itself is destroyed so one of the warriors one of the warriors i will uh i'll lose the warrior and i pick one of these symbols to remove remove and i don't like where this battle's going i think i i'm going to remove the retreat because i think i need i need to defend my uh my territory i need to do as much as i can right right now i have two reinforcements so i can bring in i can't bring in that archer i can bring in these two warriors and roll their two dice so we're both now above the capacity of this area which is something we didn't point out you can go up to six well you can go above the capacity but at the end of the battle anyone who's over capacity is destroyed laying to waste on the battlefield exactly all right not terribly helpful roles so i've got another reinforcement which doesn't apply you only get a single round of reinforcements and i got another retreat so at least i'm going to be able to save some units and run away at the end of this okay if i don't chop you first no yeah you can probably run away all right all right so now it is battle card time um i could play i can play archer and warrior you've got three units in the battle so you have to choose which one so i will play this one first my first battle card yep so this lets you gain a retreat or a reinforcement icon guess what i have a feeling i've got another tree monster coming my way that's right hello uh-oh so now you roll another tree monster die into the battle that is two shots parent okay a couple of extra hits i'm in a bit of trouble now sorry tara all right i will play i will play my um my archer here so my archer card lets me roll an extra archer die into the battle which does a hit so that's good and it gives me a reinforcement so i can if i reinforce with um the issues if i reinforce here i am giving up this territory so that's true that's i'm putting it at risk oh no i'm not i've got an archer there oh yeah it was like this little ice all right we're going we're going in you're going in okay i've got enough retreats to save the ones that don't get here okay okay let's do this now um i'm going i'll just re-roll the reinforcement phase is done so i'm out of dice i'll just re-roll this one so there we go i've got another retreat so at least at least you can come back out all right uh your second battle die so i'm not going to play my three monster because taryn has not rolled any shield so the ability is to cancel a shield so i'm going to play this one instead the shield bearer yep which gives me an extra die extra shield don't die the yellow one and that is the shield getting tougher and then my second battle card is the warrior cards so once again it cancels one of your retreats and one of your shields but now because this is level two i can re-roll one of these uh one of these dice so this was an unused re is this an unused reinforcement no i used all my reinforcements so i will re-roll one of my retreats trying to land a hit and it's a retreat again that's all right it gave me the gave me the chance okay okay now it is time for the retreats so i have three hits four retreats you have four hits and no retreats i'm going to lose i'm going to lose this battle i don't see a way around it i've got eight units you've got seven units and you've got and you've got some shields you've done the panic already yes that's right all right so i need to minimize my losses i will use my four retreats but i have to be careful about how i do this so i'm going to retreat an archer i'm going to retreat a warrior see i want to retreat my archer but then i'm going to lose the hit but i do want to keep the archer so i'm going to use the third retreat to retreat this archer and that's it that's full capacity there bring that one back that is at full capacity so but i'm out of space in that area so not much more i can do about that okay all right you have no retreats so now it's time to resolve the hits let's do that so i've got three hits i've got four hits and you've got three three shields one of which is cancelled yeah let's just pretend it's the one that's scandal so you suffer one hit you have to lose one unit from the area one warrior's gone i suffer four hits so i'll lose my two free units that appear as part of the fence and then it's it's not going to matter i thought it will so i'll retreat those and there we have it it's now the battle is done uh you have a six to one advantage in units so you win the battle you get the conquest card thank you i have to retreat now here i can retreat to a vacant adjacent area because this one is full is at full capacity so i'll pop back there lucky you can do it otherwise you you'll be gone as well yep you destroy my headquarters so i now have to build that again this is really going to set me back sorry darren uh you complete the goal for defeating someone else's area bringing the goals back in here that we completed so it's one goal a piece um finally because this area has a capacity of four and you have six in there you could do that for the battle but now the excess are killed so i have one extra capacity for my faction that is true so i can only get i can only destroy i can only destroy one one two three four five so one warrior is gone that's it this is the cheapest cheapest one the warriors indeed so that uh that messes up my plans to try to get these central areas and it gives you a really good foothold so you're in quite a good position now and that is the end of the round all right so the first thing that happens at the end of the round is we collect so we showed you using the collect cards before but you also automatically collect off all of your areas at the end of the round so but only the energy not the iron so i am in a lean position losing this really hurts there as well i've got five six only eight energy so my energy collection no iron i've got i'll do it from here so 5 6 7 8 nine ten fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen and twenty so from one to twenty one all right and so you you can really see there even we mentioned this at the start even though these goals are tactical if you don't set up an area that you can get energy from um i i would concede if we were if we were playing right now because i need to spend three energy to get my headquarters back um i need to then get units you can get way more units you can just you can squash me okay so i needed to um yeah i would certainly have played that quite differently yep all right the last thing that happens is we resolve the terraforming so each of these markers the terraforming happens so down here in area 50 we've got grassland turning into mountain so we take the terraforming marker off we place the mountain tile 450 onto there and the energy flips over to iron uh we have 34 will be rising out of the water so those that's going in your place that's the one that i placed trying to get that objective there we go we've got another land bridge same thing happens here over here at 39 so this pops in and now we have that and then up here number 12 sinks into the the energy marker stays there so we know what it produces if it ever comes back and the landscape is different the the attack lines have changed i'm now on an isthmus which is a really dangerous place to be if you want to charge across and we would we would then move on to drawing the next terraforming cards and setting up for the next round and we take all of our action cards back so you have full range at the start of the turn and so there we have it that is one round of tectonia we've shown you pretty much every mechanism and every action in the game uh we've shown you some of the objectives we haven't shown you every type of unit so there are riders who move more quickly and animals that also move more quickly and there are four different factions and all of their units have different flavors and different different styles so we are of course also using prototype pieces through this play through um here's a look at what the actual wooden pieces are going to look like so um yeah it'll be a certainly an upgrade on what you've seen here and some very nice little pieces and that's the playthrough of daktonia we hope that you enjoyed the video we are using a prototype copy of the game and so the rules and components are not final and do check out the project page for the game we will put a link to that in the description below if you find this video useful please help us by hitting that like button subscribe to us you can also hit the meeple in the corner to do so and hit the bell icon so you'll know when we have new videos you can also follow me on instagram for my board games journey questions comments and feedback are all welcome and please leave that in the comment section below thanks for watching and see you next time