The Wonder You Race to Finish

Most buildings in Age of Empires II do a job. The Wonder does not. It produces nothing, defends nothing, and costs a fortune — and if you finish one and keep it standing through the countdown, you simply win. Play the Mayans and the thing you are racing to build is the Temple of the Great Jaguar: Tikal Temple I, the funerary pyramid of Jasaw Chan Kʼawiil I.

The model is a fair likeness of the real profile — the steep stack of terraces, the single dark doorway at the summit, the crest of stone above it — but it is dressed the way a strategy game needs a landmark dressed, in painted masks and bright banding across every tier. That is not as fanciful as it looks. Temple I was plastered and painted, and its roof comb carried a moulded image of the seated king. What the game gets wrong is mostly that the real one has weathered to bare grey limestone, and the render shows you what thirteen centuries took off it.

What the game leaves out is the reason the pyramid exists. Temple I is a tomb: the king went into the ground first and the fifty-five metres went up over him afterwards. In Age of Empires you build it to end the game; at Tikal it was built because a reign had ended.

Then the same game gives you the rest of the story somewhere else entirely. Dos Pilas, a scenario in Age of Empires II HD: The Forgotten and later in the Definitive Edition’s Historical Battles, is loosely based on the Second Tikal–Calakmul War of 648–695 AD, and opens by telling you the Yucatán is dominated by two city-states competing for control. The man who won that war for Tikal in 695 is Jasaw Chan Kʼawiil I. You can spend one session fighting his war and another building his tomb, and the game never mentions that they are the same person.