Base price: $35.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures was provided by Synapses Games.

I am alarmed that this game came out in 2025; I was certain that it was a 2023 title, but apparently this year has just been brutally long. Thankfully, it’s almost over. Just about 23 more days or so until we can kick off 2026 and arbitrarily decide that the next year is going to be better than this one. Highs and lows, I suppose, though I do enjoy New Year’s Eve. Wildly unsafe day to drive, but otherwise very fun. This also reminds me that it’s time to start revving up the engine for 2026 titles and Kickstarters, so there’s a lot to look forward to next year. Plus, maybe I’ll even travel a bit more! In the meantime, however, let’s check out Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures!

In Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures, players are on a quest to unearth cool pyramids. That said, I don’t think there are boring pyramids, so “cool pyramids” feels kind of redundant. Like, even Nicolas Cage’s pyramid tomb is genuinely fascinating. Even the Bass Pro Shop pyramid is strangely compelling. I don’t know what to tell y’all. I’ll ask an expert and if she comes back with any I’ll update this review. But these pyramids in particular house treasures and gems of immense value (I hope culturally; don’t sell artifacts), so your interest in piqued. Dig up your pyramid and see what you find!

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Not much. Shuffle the tiles up:

Make five roughly-even stacks face-down. Place three gems in front of each at random:

Reveal the tiles on top of the first, third, and fifth stacks. You’re ready to start!

Gameplay

Your goal is to build pyramids! Here, you’ll be building up pyramids over the course of the game and using gems to score points over four rounds.

Each round, you’re taking fewer dominoes as you build up your pyramid. When you take a face-up domino, you also take a gem from the corresponding pile (refilling it to 3 if it empties) and then reveal the top domino from one of the face-down piles. Placing the domino is simple. In round 1, it must be placed next to any domino tile. In subsequent rounds, as you build up, you can place anywhere on the next level. So you’ll take 10 dominoes in round 1, 6 in round 2, 3 in round 3, and 1 in round 4.

Once everyone has completed the current level, you can attempt to score. To score, look at the various areas of a single color on your entire pyramid (lower levels count). If you place a gem of the same color, you score 1 per gem in that area. If you place three gems of the same color, you score 2 per gem in that area. Note that white gems are “mythical” and two of them can replace any single gem. You also get 1 point for each mythical gem you have left. Tally scores for the round, and the player who earned the fewest points in the current round starts the next one. You can’t keep more than five gems, however, so you have to return them between rounds.

Play continues until the end of round four. Total your scores and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

One of the most common refrains you hear here on What’s Eric Playing? is how random markets are affected by player count, and this one is no exception. It’s an issue of chaos in a system: is it better or worse to have more players pulling from a shared random market? That answer will largely boil down to whether or not it helps you. If more players revealing tiles means you get what you want, you’ll likely enjoy it. If a lot of what you want comes up at once, you may prefer a smaller player count so you have a better chance of getting more of the tiles you need. This also has a bit of the same double-draft style markets you’ll see in games like Cascadia, where players choose a pair of things rather than just one thing. Here, it’s a tile and a gem from the pile of (at most) three in front of the tile stack. It gives the player flexibility (choices within choices!) but may slow the game down if another player takes too long to decide what they want. That’s not player count-dependent, however; that’s dependent on the players themselves. As a result, there’s some differences between player counts but their impact on gameplay is hard to gauge since it depends so much on how the market plays out.

Strategy

• Don’t blow all your gems too early. If you run out of gems, you can’t score up when you have a larger pyramid. That might not be the worst thing in the world, but you can get a ton more points later in the game when larger portions of your pyramid are big blocks of the same color.
• You’re going to have trouble making the entire pyramid one color; find ways to compromise. That’s not how the dominoes work, unfortunately. They’re split colors, so you’re going to have to compromise somewhat. You can make up for some of that as you build up the pyramid by covering unusable colors with squares of the color whose area you want to expand. You can even connect two split areas by building up!
• If you make the entire outer edge one color, it’ll connect as you build up. Like I said. You can build out and around to make one big rectangular outline and then build up to the top so you have a giant area. That’s the dream, at least, but your opponents will likely never let that happen, because, well, that would be insane.
• You can try hate-drafting but that’s usually a terrible idea unless you need the same tiles. Taking a color you have no use for is pretty explicitly a bad idea? So don’t do that. Pretty much under any circumstances! If you absolutely have to, that’s one thing, but otherwise there’s no benefit to you.
• You can risk it all for a massive scoring opportunity at the end of the game but you need the gems and the tiles to make it happen. If you can get the entire pyramid to have at least one connected square of the same color you can claim a ton of gem points if they’re present, but you need to have three gems of that color and get the tiles lined up to your benefit. That’s extremely hard to do.
• The tile backs tell you what gems are on the tiles but not where they are, which can (and should) affect how you place them. It’ll at least tell you which tiles you potentially want to flip over, which is worth something.
• I find that I often choose a tile to reveal if I want another player to take it because I specifically don’t want or need it. If you don’t give them a ton of options you can at least potentially force them to do something approximating what you want? That’s the dream, at least. Ideally, getting rid of tiles you don’ t want to take will give you some ability to take the tiles you do want.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I do appreciate a game that’s over 30 minutes but still has pretty minimal setup. You just need to shuffle the tiles and mix all the gems together and then you’re pretty good! It’s honestly nice to have a low-lift game like that, even though I usually find myself playing on Board Game Arena.
• I like the way the gems shine on the tiles. It’s a generally nice finish on the tiles overall. It’s a good-looking game.
• The actual planning and work to get the tiles to lay out how you want them to (so that areas that were previously lucrative still connecting up the pyramid) is super interesting! Yeah, it’s nontrivially difficult to actually get everything to go where you want it to go, so trying to get at least a functional compromise in place is usually pretty fun too. I like the strategy and I’m always down for a little bit of drafting.
• The stacking element is fun too! Everyone loves a bit of a 3D element. It’s great.
• Turn-to-turn the game is pretty quick. You’re just drafting a tile each turn and taking a gem! It’s pretty simple.
• The inventory management elements are interesting; nice ways to balance risk and reward. Having to figure out when and how to use your gems to maximize your score is, I think, almost as tricky as the right way to build up your actual pyramid. It’s all good.
• I appreciate that the insert was designed to let you just kind of stack the tiles in there; very polite. A simple but effective insert goes a long way. You love to see it.

Mehs

• You can definitely make the same mistake as in a 5×5 game of Kingdomino (where you place tiles such that you can’t make a fully-filled area). The game lets you ignore it for subsequent rounds but I wish you could just tell players “don’t do that”. It’s just frustrating when you have to take a null turn because you messed up some of the spatial reasoning elements of these games.
• I ran into a situation where going first was actually terrible, which was pretty funny. Desperately couldn’t use any of the tiles in round 4, but I happened to score the lowest in round 3 and was therefore forced to go first against my will, which ruined the entire finale of the game. Tough, but fair.

Cons

• It can be very frustrating for players if the random market doesn’t work with their strategy. Sometimes the tiles you need just never come up! It’s really not the best outcome and it can be frustrating for affected players, but that’s the business.

Overall: 7.75 / 10

Overall, I like Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures! As far as things go, it’s a pretty relaxing game as long as you internalize the inventory management rules. If you forget how they work and suddenly lose 10+ points, you’re liable to get pissed, and I think that’s pretty justified. But the core game itself has some nice, elegant gameplay of laying dominoes to create areas and then scoring them based on gems. It’s got a lot of similarities to Kingdomino, though more in a “convergent evolution” sense. Kingdomino is a game of building a square and making big areas with lots of crowns; Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures wants you to think more about how your pyramid changes round-to-round with stacking tiles on top of other tiles and making sure you have enough gems to score. Different games for sure, but fans of one will likely enjoy the other if they’re okay with a step up (Kingdomino to Pyramido) or down (vice-versa) in complexity. The art style of Pyramido is also quite nice. Bold, saturated colors with a bit of shine to the gems gives the game a pleasant amount of table presence. It probably would have been a bit more ornate if they had made the tiles thicker (or done something like Saloon Tycoon where you place cubes between the tiles to make the buildings vertically bigger), but I’m all in favor of keeping costs down. There’s always a way to make a game cost more, if you want. But I digress. While it doesn’t necessarily strike me as the most ambitious game, Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures does a fun job forcing players to think in three dimensions and balance points now against points later in a way that’s fairly unique amongst games I’ve tried. And if you’re looking for some spatial reasoning challenges, inventory management gameplay, or you just want to build a cool pyramid, Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures might be right up your alley!

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