Taj Mahal

Complexity Medium Duration Medium Players 3-5 Producer Rio Grande Games (alea) Size Medium

Premise

Attempt to take over provinces of India

Review

This is another excellent German game. It's almost as visually stunning as El Grande but makes no use of wood, the plastic pieces are beautifully made however.

The aim of the game is to gain influence over the provinces of India, build a network of palaces and gain economic dominance. All these actions get you points, and the person with the highest points wins at the end of the game.

There are twelve provinces each with city locations in a network. Connecting provinces together with your cities gains you more points. You win the right to place palaces by playing a bidding war with your cards. Each province has a Vizier, General, Monk, Princess and Grand Mongul to try and control. Every card has symbols on it and if when you withdraw from the bidding you have a majority in any areas (including a bid to control the province itself) then you take the corresponding courtier tile. Placing any city in a province gains you a point. On various city locations are special bonus tiles, which can gain you bonus points or commodities.

Winning commodities either by winning the province or acquiring bonus tiles gains you points, with additional points if you already have existing commodities of that type.

The play of the cards is very cleverly designed. It might seem that it's best to stay until the bitter end to try and outbid everyone else. This is made more difficult by the requirement to play cards of a single colour. In addition, winning two courtiers of the same type allows you to claim a special card. This can give you bonus symbols or extra points or even allows you to change colour temporarily. You can also play special wildcards with your coloured cards, but doing so can reduce your final points.

The most cunning part of the cards is that the last player to withdraw only gains one card as replenishment, whereas the other players get a choice of any two from the ones on display. This generally means that you have to carefully plan how you are going to play your cards to avoid running out.

At game end, players gain additional points for any unused wildcards they have and a point for each card in their longest colour suit.

The game is beautifully balanced and quite unique in that there is no text anywhere except the rulebook, which goes to show that you don't need huge reams of text to make a game fun. There is enough randomness in the setup and cards to ensure that every game is different. It's less confrontational than El Grande but almost as much fun.

Rating

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