Author Topic: Taj Mahal  (Read 1537 times)

Offline Hounk

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Taj Mahal
« on: February 26, 2016, 08:27:32 AM »
This is a game, I bought a few months ago on eBay together with a bunch of other board game. It was not one of the main games, I went for in that offer, these had been "7 Wonders" and "Andor", but never the less, the first game I introduced to my gaming group and till now, we played it quite a few times. Unfortunately, it turned out, that one in our regular group of four, doesn't really like it. I first blamed it to the fact, that he was introduced to the game later then we other three, thus giving him a disadvantage. But after a few more games, this did not really change, so we probably will leave it to occasions, when he has a night off our gaming meetings. There are plenty of other games, we can agree al four of us on.

Taj Mahal is an older game by Reiner Knizia, which combines quite intriguingly different mechanisms and ways to score points. The meat of the game, is resource management in the form of collecting cards, which give you some form of influence. In each round, you have to consider, if it serves you best to withdraw early, getting better picks for the next cards, or fighting for a specific token. You will not succeed, if you always fight for the maximum, occasionally even have to withdraw without getting anything, to strengthen yourself for later rounds. There are only 12 rounds total, so this is always a tough decision, but not everything in the game. You build up a network of palaces in your player colour, which gets more rewarding, if you can connect them in lines across the map, and there are also 4 different commodities to fight for, which also make more points, if you collect sets of the same one. Plus there are bonus tiles scattered across the board and bonus cards to gain, which are also very valuable to improve your strategy or give straight away points. One nice touch is, that the regular cards are discarded after playing them, while the bonus cards can be taken on the hand again until some other player has the right to claim them. There is lots going on with not to many rules, but everything fits together nicely, thus making it often a tough choice, what to do in a given situation. In our group, I'm doing quite well at the moment, though I think, we still need quite a lot more games, till we scratch the knowledge of good strategies. It looks like a game easy to learn, difficult to master. But it still plays fun to (most of) us.

Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=2483.0


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