Pyramid Review
Taluva
Published by Rio Grande Games
Designed by Marcel-Andre Merkle
Boxed Tile Board Game; $30
Taluva is ostensibly a game of peoples settling volcanic islands from Marcel-Andre Merkle, designer of Attika, published by Rio Grande Games. Its a fun, quick-playing tile laying game with neat buildings, a relevant third dimension, and a tendency to surprise you.
Each player begins the game with a supply of buildings in their color: 20 huts, three temples, and two towers. Each turn you must draw one of the 48 terrain tiles, add it to the map, then build.
Each terrain tile consists of a triangle of three hexes, one of which is a volcano, the other two are grassland, jungle, desert, rock, or lake. The first two terrain types are much more common than the latter three. There are some doubles, as in Volcano-Lake-Lake. You can place a tile anywhere on the table contacting the existing map on one or more hexsides, even creating holes if you like. You can also place tiles over existing tiles in a volcanic eruption, which is subject to the following additional rules: the volcano hex of the tile you place must sit on top of an existing volcano hex, the newly placed tile must be supported under all three of its hexes (no caves), and the newly placed tile must cover parts of at least two previous tiles (you can't stack straight up). You can crush huts (your own or others), which are removed from the game. You may not destroy temples . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 30, 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.