The Statues You Keep Carving

Games almost never let you visit the moai. They let you make them — and then make another, and another. Civilization V handed the statues to Polynesia not as a wonder but as a tile improvement: your workers raise a Moai on a coastal tile, it earns Culture, and it earns more Culture for every Moai standing next to it. Play the coastline properly and you finish the game with a rim of stone faces looking inland over your own cities. Strip out the yield numbers and that is, more or less, what actually happened on a 164-square-kilometre volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific.

It did not start that way. In Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword the Moai Statues were a national wonder — one per empire, coastal city only, +1 production on every water tile that city works. One monument, built once, ticked off the list. Gathering Storm went back to the repeatable version and, better, attached it to Rapa Nui itself, now a cultural city-state on the map: win its suzerainty and your builders learn how to carve. The improvement pays out best on volcanic soil, which is an oddly faithful bit of design — the real statues were cut from consolidated volcanic ash at a single quarry, Rano Raraku, which supplied about 95 percent of all moai.

Tropico 6 declines to carve anything. Its Ahu Akivi Moai Heads are one of the world wonders El Presidente acquires the honest way, by commando raid, and the heist briefing is a straight joke about the archaeology: the squad reports it cannot move the heads without “a large number of wooden rollers,” and asks for logs to be shipped in, since there are no trees for thousands of miles. That is the old sledges-and-rollers transport hypothesis, plus the island-deforestation story, compressed into a mission objective and then flown home by cargo plane. The stolen heads end up on a lawn between a stolen Colosseum and a stolen Eiffel Tower. Ahu Akivi, for the record, is the one real platform whose seven moai face out to sea rather than inland — so something on that island was always facing the wrong way.

The moai may be the most-copied ancient monument in the medium: moai.games, a fan-run database started by developer Matt Sephton, has catalogued more than a thousand titles containing one. Almost all of those are background gags — a stone face parked in a level to say “island.” The strategy games are the rare case where you have to do the work, statue by statue, until the coast runs out. On Rapa Nui the count reached nearly 900 and then stopped, for reasons still being argued over. In the games, you stop when there is no coastline left to fill.