The Princes of Machu Picchu love the llama

My monthly game night was called off due to the host's sickness, which left me falling back to a regular Wednesday game night at Green Lake Games (7509 Aurora Ave N, in Seattle). I played one game of Race for the Galaxy, and then jumped into today's game topic: The Princes of Machu Picchu.

My good friend Dan almost lured me into a 10-day South American trip, including Machu Picchu. The expenses for it were high - probably around $10k by the end of the trip. It would have included the Galapago Islands, which is known for its unique wildlife and extreme protection of the place. (Only a certain number of people per boat can be onshore at any one time. If you're on a larger boat, you'd have to take shifts - and it's supposed to get too busy permanently soon. It sounds like a game idea!)

But Machu Picchu was the draw. When I was younger, I had a strong fascination with archaeology. Incans, Mayans, Troy, Greece, Crete...in 5th grade I was placed into a talented & gifted program for an archaeology class, along with 7 other students from other schools in the district. Anyhow, the trip would have been maybe 2 days of MP, which was the ultimate no-go statement.

The game, The Princes of Machu Picchu, is designed by Mac Gerdts. He also designed Antike, Imperial, and Hamburgum. Antike is the first game I played of his - the rondel was excellent, and made the game graceful and elegant. He continued the use of the rondel in Imperial. Imperial is a favorite of my friends...instead of a war game, it's an investment game where whoever controls the most shares in a country calls the shots. Imperial broke from the elegant model, so I've skipped Hamburgum for now. PMP was a store copy, so no greenbacks were harmed for this brief review.

PMP has three elements to the game - your runner, who runs laps up the mountain, measuring your favor with the gods. Your princes rack up free gifts (and trigger peasants) and let you buy priests/virgins/peasants. Your peasants occupy spaces where goods are produced - if any prince comes along to pick up a free item, you can spend a corn (the currency) to buy that good too. If you have more peasants there, you can trigger multiple times.

The game uses a wide variety of mechanics in the game - movement of the princes, resource management, lots of guesswork on the motives of other players, the loose turns (who's going to end the round, and when?), and trying to figure out the scores of your opponents.

The 5-player game wrapped up in about 2.5 hours. We spent most of the game thinking the game would end on one of the three conditions, but was averted in the final moments. There's so much going on, with so many options, you can't efficiently guess player motives, except for possibly the last round.

The upsides of the game, is that there's usually always something interesting to consider. You can adapt your VP cards when you draw new ones, freeing you from a bad draw on previous card draws. You can frequently get stuff for cheap, if you want to invest in infrastructure (which means not investing in things that give you favor.) And you can say "llama" a lot, which was fun.

It is not the hyper-elegant game of Antike - the mechanics deal in a lot more variety of options. As such, you witness analysis-paralysis in most players, even if they aren't normally pre-disposed to it. And with all of the options, your ability to guess player motives (which are very important) is severely hampered. After a first game of it, I would be hard-pressed to say I guessed anyone's plays correctly more than 30% of the time.

This is still a fair game, which will see 4-5 plays this year. New players can play it with little introduction and few rules hang-ups.