Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar
Place workers onto interlocking gears, let time carry them toward stronger actions, and decide exactly when waiting is worth more than acting now.
Place workers onto interlocking gears that advance automatically as the central calendar turns.
Removing a worker later grants a stronger action, so the key decision is how long to wait before converting time into resources, technology or points.
Why We Love It
Tzolk’in makes waiting a strategic resource. Workers become more valuable as the gears rotate, but leaving them in place too long can prevent you from using them elsewhere.
About Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar
Place workers onto interlocking gears that advance automatically as the central calendar turns.
Removing a worker later grants a stronger action, so the key decision is how long to wait before converting time into resources, technology or points.
Game at a Glance
Place Workers
Choose which gear and starting position best fit your plan.
Let Time Advance
Workers rotate toward stronger actions automatically.
Remove at the Right Time
Taking a worker activates the current space but frees it for future use.
Build a Long-Term Cycle
Coordinate food, resources, temples and technology around the calendar.
What is Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar?
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar is a 2012 strategy game by Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani for 2–4 players. Its defining system is a set of connected rotating gears.
Workers placed on gears become more valuable as the calendar advances, creating a worker-placement game where time itself changes the available actions.
How the game works
On your turn, you generally either place workers onto the lowest available positions of gears or remove workers to resolve the actions where they currently sit.
At the end of each round, the central calendar advances and rotates all connected gears, moving workers toward stronger action spaces. Resources, technologies, monuments, temples and feeding obligations create multiple scoring paths.
The decisions that define it
The key tension is whether to remove a worker now for a useful action or leave it on the gear for a stronger future result. Waiting improves action value but also locks that worker away.
Worker placement costs also rise as you commit more workers in one turn, making timing and action batching important.
Who is it for?
Choose Tzolk’in if you want medium-heavy worker placement with unusually visible timing decisions and several interlocking development systems.
Choose Stone Age for a simpler introduction or The White Castle for a more compact modern worker-placement puzzle.
Learn Tzolk’in in depth
Publisher sources & scope
Checked September 16, 2026. This hub covers the Tzolk’in base game, not Tribes & Prophecies.