Thesauros

Elznir Games · 2025

Translation, English to German

I’ll pre-empt the potential confusion right away: Thesauros is Greek and means ‘treasure’. It has nothing to do with thesaurus (which is a dinosaur that eats books). This is a nicely thematic worker placement title that puts players in the shoes of shady treasure hunters on a small tropical island somewhere. Everyone’s competing to find the best sunken treasures to display at the museum, where prominent placement will earn reputation. Getting to these treasures, however, requires jumping through quite a few hoops. You need antique maps to find the best locations of sunken ships, you need diving equipment to reach the deeper regions, you need better outboard motors to get out to sea faster than the others, you need sonar, harpoons, and shark cages. Oh, and workers, obviously. How do you get all this stuff? Well, you buy it with money. So, make sure you start each year by allocating sufficient funds to recruit people, research tech, buy stuff and sponsor exhibitions, pay for travel costs, and of course to bribe the local authorities. The game components are brilliant, with little wooden zodiac boats you can actually put your worker meeples into and special hats the meeples get to where when you promote them to specialists. If you and your gaming group want to up the hostile interaction, there’s mercenary rules for stealing equipment, sabotaging seaplanes, conducting smear campaigns, and even planting naval mines. As worker placement games go, this one definitely leans towards the heavier side. In principle, the game flow is clearly organised into stages on the game board map and the rulebook structure follows these. Each individual comes with its own set of specific rules, however, so figuring out how all the aspects mesh together was key to getting everything translated nicely. Even though there’s an element of 1990s pre-prime-time adventure series – a bit of Thunder in Paradise with a smattering of Relic Hunter sans the supernatural – the inherent realism didn’t leave too much room for coming up with creative terms. I translated this one in the native layout, which saw me learning first-hand about text threading. Having the entirety of the rulebook text (33 pages) connect across all of the text frames blew the layout sky high when the German texts started doing their plus-20-percent volume thing. That didn’t keep me from enjoying the project, though.