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Tutankhamen is an analytical majority-control game by Reiner Knizia, published by Out of the Box Games.
Players: 2-6
Time: 20-30 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
Tutankhamen comes with:
- 1 plastic pyramid
- 70 artifact tiles
- 90 tribute coins
- 6 player tokens
- 2 rulesheets
Plastic Pyramid: A hard plastic pyramid which sits at the head of the artifact trail. It has a ledge for placement of the special King Tut Tile and also a slot which tribute coins are dropped into. The pyramid is generally sturdy and attractive. Its use as a coin bank is cute, but gets a little tiring during the game, when you have to drop coin after coin into it, one at a time; it might have been a bit better if the coin slot were bigger. In any case, by the end of our second game, we largely weren't using the pyramid as coin bank.
Artifact Tiles: 70 trapezoid-shaped pieces, each of which depicts an artifact on the front. Most of the artifacts are parts of sets (e.g., 8 purple burial masks) and also list the size of the set (e.g., 8). They're all printed full color on glossy, thick cardboard. The trapezoids are arrayed together into a single, curving path which forms the "game board" for Tutankhamen.
Tribute Coins: 90 small plastic golden coins which players are trying to get rid of during the course of the game. Each is printed with the phrase "Out of the Box" on front and bank, which is a pity; some sort of Egyptian pictogram would have been more appropriate and evocative.
Player Tokens: Six wooden pawns in a variety of plain colors (black, gold, silver, white, dark brown, light brown). The colors go nicely with the other pieces in the set, but they're so unusual for a game that many of our players had troubles keeping track of which color they were.
Rulesheets: Two rule sheets, each printed as a six-page glossy sheet. They're full color and full of examples. Splitting the rules into two sheets ("rules" and "artifact reference") makes them a little awkward to read when you're learning the game, but probably improves their use as reference. We also did have a few timing issues which weren't explicitly covered by the rules.
Overall the the pieces in Tutankhamen are high-quality and evocative. Some of the choices for how the pieces were constructed weren't ideal, as noted above, but it's still a very nicely produced game, thus earns a "4" out of "5" for Style: above average.
The Gameplay
The object of Tutankhamen is to get rid of all your tribute coins through the collection of artifact set majorities.
Setup: The pyramid is laid in the middle of the table, then the 70 artifact tiles are randomized before being laid out in a single, curving path leading out from the pyramid.
Each player gets a pawn which is placed at the start of the artifact track.
Each player also gets 14-32 tribute coins (depending on the number of players) which they'll be trying to get rid of.
 Taking Your Turn: The game turn in Tutankhamen is very simple. You move your piece forward to an artifact of your choice, then collect that artifact.
If you were last on the artifact line, any artifacts that you pass over are now discarded, because they're behind everyone, and thus no one may retrieve them.
Regular Artifacts. 63 of the artifacts are parts of simple sets. There are three sets of size 1, three of size 2, three of size 4, three of size 6, and three of size 8. Usually you just take your collected artifact and put it in front of you; however if it's the last artifact of its type, scoring immediately occurs. (Some artifacts will be in players hands, while others might have been discarded because they were passed.)
To score an artifact set, each player adds up how many they have. Whoever has the most gets points equal to the total size of the set (1-8) , while whoever has the second most gets half that. Ties are unfriendly which means that if two people two for first, they get the second place score; if two people tie for second they get nothing.
And when I say you get points, I really mean that you deposit tribute coins in the pyramid.
Bags of Gold. There are three bags of gold; if you collect one of these you can take any artifact from another player, but they immediately get to deposit a tribute coin.
Pharaohs. There are three pharoahs; these can be used as wild cards. You can add them to any set as if they were a member of that set, possibly helping you gain majority.
King Tut. The last tile, placed on that ledge of the pyramid, is the King Tut tile. It acts as a pharaoh tile, but also lets you immediately deposit a gold coin.
Since you can only ever go forward, once you've reached King Tut, you're done. You get to still keep turning in sets as they're completed, but you don't get to move any more (and thus you can't collect any more artifacts).
Ending the Game: The game ends when someone deposits all of their coins. It's worth noting that you can be doing a lot better than another player, and have absolute majority in a couple of nice sets, but if your sets are never finished off, it doesn't matter because you don't get to score them. This is one of the nice strategic aspects of the game, as you have to figure out not only what sets you're going for, but also where all their tiles are located.
(Alternatively, if no one deposits all of their coins, whoever has the least when everyone reaches the pyramid wins.)
Relationships to Other Games
Tutankhamen is technically a share-based majority-control game. As such it has similarities to classics like Acquire and Union Pacific. As with many share-based majority-control games, this one is very close in feel to a more classic set collection games such as Rummy.
Tutankhamen is also one of the most analytical of Knizia's games because of its very pure gameplay; there's randomness at setup but from that point on you have all the information and the only thing that can upset your plans is the actions of other players. Most other Knizia games, even fairly pure abstracts like Tigris & Euphrates, have at least some degree of in-game randomness, which this one does not.
The Game Design
The most amazing thing about Tutankhamen is that it's a highly analytical game. I'd be tempted to say entirely analytical because there's essentially no random element (just player chaos), which means that every move you makes needs to be pushing you toward success. There's good strategy in this, in that you're trying to figure out long term which artifacts you're going to try and gain control of, but also a surprising amount of tactics, as sometimes clever moves are possible, particularly if you're in the position of being last in line and thus able to decide which pieces disappear forever. I also found this game to occasionally form interesting puzzles, one of the best aspects of any tactical game.
The game's emphasis on analysis also provides some of its flaws. There's always the danger of "analysis paralysis", with players becoming lost because there are so many possibilities (literally, there are 70 places to move the first turn). Somewhat worse is the fact that the high analysis means that there's a heavy king-maker factor in the game; in the last turns of the game you can sometimes choose either to sacrifice yourself or alternatively to decide which of several players wins. This came up in each of our plays, though it was more serious in one game than the other. To combat both of these problems I've seen some suggest using a short move timer, and that's not a bad idea.
On the whole Tutankhamen is not as polished as some of Reiner Knizia's later designs, but it still proves to be a very interesting game. If not for the end-game issues I'd recommend Tutankhamen unreservedly to gamers of any sort. With them, I do have some reservations, though I think the game will work better for more casual players for whom the kingmaking issues might never arise.
I originally gave Tutankhamen a low "4" out of "5" for Substance, but I've since dropped that to a "3" because king-making issues have been a problem in every game I've played, and it usually puts me off the game afteward.
Conclusion
Tutankhamen, one of Reiner Knizia's earlier designs, has now been reprinted by Out of the Box Games. The game is nicely produced and offers very interesting analysis; some end-game issues might ultimately turn off the most serious gamers, but for more casual players, which is really Out of the Box's audience, I think this is a fine game, and in fact one of the deepest releases in the Out of the Box line.
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