Here is an overview of Tiletum after playing it at Gencon. We only played one round but it gave a good feeling for how everything works.
TL;DR: This is an awesome game.
Tiletum is a dice drafting game. In each of the 4 rounds of the game, you will use 3 dice to gather resources and do actions, then there is end of round scoring and some cleanup.
On your turn you choose a die: the color and value will tell you which and how many resources you get. There are five colors associated with the five resources - wool, stone, iron, food and gold.
The place where you took your die from, tells you which action you can take. The higher the dice value, the less actions you get (it's always 7 minus the value). So e.g. a 5 die gets you 5 resources and 2 actions.
There are 6 actions, the sixth is just a Joker where you get choose any of the other five.
- The King action basically just moves you up the king track to get bonus points and get the first player marker at end of the round.
- The Merchant actions allows you to move your merchant meeple on the map, place houses and take bonus tokens.
- The Architect action allows you to move your architect meeple on the map, place pillars and take bonus tokens.
- The Citizen action allows you to take citizens and/or place them into your houses. 349
They might give you bonuses, and filled houses also unlock additional buildable houses.
- The Contract actions allow you to take contract cards or trade resources. Fulfilled contracts unlock additional pillars you can place.
- There are also a few different free actions you can do on your turn: using the bonus tiles you got from the map or action wheel, fulfilling contracts, placing crest tiles on your houses, contributing to cathedrals where you already have pillars.
You are also watching the end of round objectives - to even take part you either need a house or your merchant meeple in the given city.
Spots to place houses and pillars are of course limited, taken bonus tokens don't get refilled and the cathedral tokens go down in value as they are built, so there is some racing for things.
There some interesting things going on on your player board. Like I said you have to unlock houses and pillars to place, as you only start with two each. The bonus tokens, citizens and contracts all go to your warehouse, which only has 4 spaces, so you can't just gather everything, you need to use them up. If you fill up houses with people and a crest you unlock plus-tokens which buff a particular action for the end of the game.
There really is a lot going on, and in a good way. I think this is a really strong contender in the T-Series, the decisions each turn are crunchy.
I gotta confess we sold Tekhenu and weren't really interested in Tabannussi after seeing it, but this has me hyped.
The biggest downside is the theme of course: traveling merchants in the Renaissance era dealing with influential people and building cathedrals.
However the game still looks awesome on the table. It immediately caught are eye as we were walking around during GenCon. 349