Taj Mahal

From: Rio Grande Games List Price: $40 Players: 3-5 Playing Time: 90 minutes  Type of game: Family strategy Skill level: 5 Complexity: 8  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 25, Winter 2001

Under the steady hand of Stefan Brücke, Alea has assembled a very impressive line. Ra, Chinatown, The Princes of Florence… not only do they play well, but they look terrific together on the shelf. Number three in the series is Reiner Knizia’s Taj Mahal, a game which seems to generate strong opinions in all players but me. I’m torn in two directions, a rare experience for me when it comes to Herr Knizia. On the one hand, Taj features all the variety of choice and strategy that we’ve come to expect from a Knizia creation. On the other, far too often those choices are overwhelmed by the capricious hand of fate in the form of other players’ essentially unforeseeable actions. Playing Taj Mahal is consequently an engaging yet frustrating experience, as strategies are mapped out and reformed only to get dashed against the rocks of chance. I’ve left every game with a feeling of futility, even when I’ve pulled off a dramatic come-from-behind victory.

Taj Mahal is set in India but, as with much of Knizia’s oeuvre, gameplay bears little relationship to the theme. The board is an abstract set of regions (not even shaped like India!) connected by a network of roads. Each region contains four intersections- some empty, others containing randomly-distributed prize tokens- on which players may build palaces during the game. Play progresses through the twelve regions with results decided by the cardplay which is the heart of the game.

If you’ve played Condotierre you’re familiar with the kind of rolling-trick system at work here. This deck contains four suits plus some wilds. Each card features one or two symbols representing the rewards being contested. To resolve each region players lay down cards one at a time, proceeding clockwise around the table. Each player is restricted to a single suit (plus wild cards) per region. On a player’s turn he can either add another card to his meld for that turn or drop out of the bidding entirely.

Dropping out, however, is not necessarily a concession. When a player folds, he checks to see if his meld displays more of any of the six reward symbols than his opponents’. If so, he claims the corresponding reward(s)— as long as they haven’t already been claimed by a previous drop-out. The ideal is to play a single card and, when play gets back around to you, be the only player showing one or both symbols on that card. The second-worst thing that can happen is to win your prize after a long, multi-card slugathon with an opponent. The worst thing that can happen is to lose that battle and limp off the field with nothing to show for it.

Some have compared this aspect of the game, with players staring each other down and touting the strength of their hand in an effort to get the other guy to fold, to poker. In reality the two games don’t feel anything alike. Although players must decide whether to throw good money after bad by playing more cards or folding, the psychology is reversed. It’s in neither player’s interest to get involved in a protracted battle, weakening their hands relative to their gleefully uninvolved opponents. After a certain point, however, most players feel that they’re already committed and play out their hands to the end, hoping they’ll outlast their rival. There is no real room for bluff here- either you’ve got the cards or you don’t.

Many cards are drawn face-up— an array is displayed at the start of each hand, and players draw two when they drop out (except for the last man standing, who gets the sole leftover). A player with an exceptional memory could therefore track other players’ holdings with a fair degree of accuracy, increasing her chances of success by knowing which battles she’s likely to win. That level of tracking is extremely difficult in practice, even for good card counters, and the occasional face-down bonus draw foils this approach even more.

The most interesting decisions involve greed. Do you drop out and claim the symbol you’re leading in, or do you stay in and try to collect others, risking the loss of your current sure thing? The game strongly encourages early drop-outs by offering more choice in palace placement, bonus tokens, and card draws, so this decision is usually an easy one, but the lure of a piggish push is strong. Complicating matters is the incentive, in the form of a concealed card draw, to fold from the get-go without playing a single card. All players will take this option sooner or later, often more than once- it’s the fastest way to build your hand back up, and the more cards you have the better your chances of winning a reward.

Commonly, then, a player chooses his strategy for a region in a vacuum and hopes it works out. If another player chooses the same strategy it can spell disaster. With experienced players there’s an implied onus to fight the player to your left, but that’s not always possible or even the most beneficial play. Consequently a player’s success often appears as random as a coin flip. All players generally seek to avoid getting drawn into a land war in Asia, and the ones who (by sheer luck) target the symbols nobody else wants to play will benefit. Perhaps this luck will even out, perhaps not.

The rewards come in various flavors. Four of them are special tokens which earn their owner a palace at one of the vacant intersections in the region. Oddly, multiple palaces aren’t necessarily worth more points, since scoring is based on regions rather than palaces. When a region is completed each player with a palace in the region scores a point, plus a point for every region connected to the current one by an unbroken chain of the player’s palaces. With three players, these chains can grow to be quite valuable as the game progresses. The increased competition with five players makes long chains much more difficult to achieve and consequently devalues a palace-centric strategy.

Palaces aren’t the only benefits of these tokens. A matching pair is instantly redeemed for a specific bonus wild card. These powerful wilds are not discarded when played, but are retained region after region until another player steals it away by redeeming the same matching pair of tokens. Having these cards at one’s disposal is a powerful advantage; timing their acquisition is therefore crucial. If all players have a purple token, the next player to get one will probably not hold onto the wild card for long- a rival is sure to collect a purple token and steal it away the following turn. Holding back on getting your second purple token until other players have redeemed theirs might let you hold it longer. Or you could take it, then snap up all cards with purple symbols on them before your opponents do to prevent them from being able to win another purple token and steal your prize.

A fifth reward allows a player to place a palace on any intersection in the region, even one already occupied. Tremendously valuable for creating long chains, this reward is not particularly helpful for a player with few or scattered palaces.

The sultan of rewards is the resource token, a chip showing two of five possible commodities. Whenever a player gains such a token, he earns a point for each commodity on the chip and for each matching commodity he’s collected over the course of the game. This reward is equally valuable regardless of the number of players in the game, and pursuing it is usually worthwhile- their value only increases as the game progresses.

Bonus commodities (as well as bonus cards and bonus points) are also available on bonus chips from certain board intersections, collected by the player placing a palace there. These chips sweeten otherwise less strategically attractive intersections.

A final bonus comes at game’s end, when players score extra points for each wild card they hold and each card in their longest suit. As in Ra, this serves to keep all the rewards and card draws relevant in the final round, where otherwise they’d be inconsequential. Sharp man, that Knizia.

Taj Mahal plays quite differently (but equally well) with varying numbers of players, with different strategies gaining or losing viability and importance. This is one of those lather-rinse-repeat games, like Aladdin’s Dragons and The Princes of Florence, where each turn is basically the same self-contained subgame that you play over and over until the game ends. The overall state of the game has little impact on each subgame, and as a result Taj may wear out its welcome a couple of rounds before it ends. There’s a lot to consider along the way, with many possible avenues to success, but the unforeseeable way in which some players butt heads and others scamper off with easy rewards renders deep tactical planning futile. I find this frustrating— almost, but not quite, enough to ruin the game for me. Instead, it knocks it down to the second or third tier of Knizia’s output. A shorter game or more forgiving card system would bump Taj up a notch in my estimation, but as it stands there’s too elaborate a framework supporting such a capricious core mechanic to call Taj a triumph. It works, and at many levels it succeeds. But it doesn’t sing.