Cost: $75.00 From:Franckh, Stuttgart, Germany Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 60-90 minutes Type of game: Strategy Complexity: 5 Skill level: 8 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 2.3, Spring 1994
Valley of the Kings is the English translation of this German beauty. Rather apt, since it does cost a king's ransom. Is it worth it? I dunno. I'm not sure any board game is worth eighty bucks (plus or minus). But Tal Der Könige is a darn fine game, and the folks at Franckh did their darndest to give us quality for our money.
Tal Der Könige is a game about building pyramids. Appropriately, the box and game board are triangular (now you'll have something to keep Ubi, the rather disastrous sequel from the makers of Trivial Pursuit, company on your shelf). Lurking within the box are four rather fancy colored markers, four sets of colored wooden pieces, four sets of colored cardboard bidding markers, four movement/reference cards, a whole bunch of large wooden cubes in five colors, and a cloth bag to hold the cubes in. Tal Der Könige is a visually appealing game. The colors are all earth tones (brown, white, black, grey, and red) which complement each other nicely. A lot of thought was obviously put into the game's graphic design.
Fortunately the snazzy look didn't come at the expense of good gameplay. Scattered about the board are sites at which players may build pyramids. Small sites accommodate two-level pyramids (five bricks total) while the large sites allow three-level pyramids (fourteen bricks). Bricks, which come in five colors, are offered up for auction in N+1 lots at the start of each turn, where N is the number of players in the game. Each lot consists of five bricks drawn at random. Players user their eight markers to bid on these lots. Four markers have a value of one through four, while the other four are blank, have no value and are used to bluff. Each player in sequence places their bidding markers face down next to the lots of their choice. Markers may be divided amongst the lots as the players choose. Some lots might receive no markers, while others might get many. When all players have placed their markers they're turned face up. For each lot, whichever player's markers add up to the highest total wins that lot, with ties going to the player who bid first (the first position rotates each turn). Any lots receiving no bids or just blanks are returned to the cloth bag. Players retrieve all of their markers once the outcome of the bidding is resolved.
Now that people have some bricks, it's time to get about the business of using them. Players have five workers with which to build, and two overseers to manage their sites. All pieces start in the center of the board. Everyone gets six movement points to allocate between their two overseers. It costs one point every time an overseer crosses a boundary on the board. Players secretly write their overseers' movements and reveal them simultaneously, resolving them in player order. If an overseer ends up at a vacant site, that player claims that site by placing there one of her eight wooden discs bearing a shiny gold image of a scarab.
Now players take turns moving their workers. Again everyone gets six movement points, but this time there are up to five pieces amongst which to divide them. Whereas overseer moves are made secretly, workers are moved openly one player at a time. When movement is complete, players may be able to steal from or take over other players' sites.
Any player who has more overseers at an opponent's site than that opponent has may, if she also has workers at that site, steal two bricks per worker from the pyramid being built there. Stolen bricks get lumped in with the ones acquired at auction. If she also has more workers there than the opponent, she may instead take over the site completely by replacing her opponent's scarab with her own.
Finally, players may build pyramids at any sites they currently control. Each worker at a site may add up to two bricks to that site's pyramid. If a pyramid is completed, the scarab marker is moved to the top of the pyramid and that site is now off-limits-- nobody can take it over or steal from it. Any bricks a player holds which are not added to one of her pyramids are instead added to the Great Pyramid being built in the center of the board. It takes thirty bricks to complete this pyramid, and when that happens the game ends. Less frequently, the also ends if pyramids are completed at every site.
Now for the payoff. Pyramids score points for their owners depending on their size and purity of color. Small pyramids of mixed colors are worth one point. Arrange bricks so that each level of the pyramid is a different color and suddenly you've got a three point pyramid. Build the whole thing out of the same color bricks and you earn four points. Large pyramids score five, nine, or eleven points. Unsurprisingly, whoever gets the most points wins.
Phew. We've finally reached the commentary portion of our show (do I go into too much detail about the mechanics of a game in my reviews? Let me know.). There's virtually no random element in this game, which goes a long way toward explaining why it works so well. When you've got such a high degree of control over your fate, bad karma doesn't enter into the equation. Let's take this from the top.
Tal Der Könige has beautiful components, artfully designed and well-executed. Almost. I have a tiny problem with the bidding markers. The fronts and backs of all of them are black. The symbols on them are printed in the color of their owner. For brown and grey, this is just peachy. Even white is ok. But since the background is black they had to fudge a bit for the black player, whose symbols are printed in white outline. I'm constantly confusing the white outline with the solid white and have to remind myself to double-check them. The other design flaw is that when face up, there is no visual difference among the blank counters-- they're all solid black on their faces. This means to give everyone their bidding counters back, they must first be flipped back face down. A minor quibble, and one easily solved with the addition of some adhesive dots, but annoying nonetheless. I have one other complaint about the equipment. A reference card is provided which, on the back, has a blank column for each overseer. You're supposed to use the provided markers to write your overseers' movements on the card. Great! But the markers aren't dry-erase. You have to wet a tissue to wipe your movements away. Anyone who's had a message board on their dormitory door in college will recall that erasing them with a moistened tissue leaves streaking behind. After a while, the card will take on the faint hue of the marker. This, combined with the inconvenience of having to moisten a tissue every turn, caused me to switch to pencil and paper after my first game.
The bidding is probably the most interesting and entertaining part of the game. In fact, some people use an alternate method whereby each player places his bidding tiles one at a time, going around eight times until everyone has placed all of their tiles. I've never tried it this way because it seems like it would extend the game tremendously. Proponents claim it doesn't take much longer and introduces much more strategy to the bidding process (it makes sense to place your blanks first to get as much info about your opponents' bidding as possible before committing your true resources-- but your opponents will expect that...). I find the game's default system to work quite well, offering its own brand of strategy (should I place all my bluffs together in one pile to make it look like I really want lot A when in fact I'm really using my high markers on lots B and C?...).
Since pyramids of uniform color are worth more points than mixed pyramids, brick lots with many bricks of the same color are more valuable than more assorted lots. Often players will bid heavily for these lots. Knowing this, it can be wise to bid instead on the other lots, which you might be able to acquire cheaply while your opponents butt heads over the plum lots. If you pick up two or three lots this way, you'll probably have more bricks of the same color than you'd have gotten if you'd won the contested plum lot anyway.
If you're already building a black pyramid, black bricks are obviously of greater value to you than white ones. If other players are building white pyramids, you may be able to scarf up the lots with black bricks without any opposition. Of course, if those lots also happen to have white bricks, your opponents might want them too. As you can see, there's quite a lot to think about during the auction phase.
There are always enough things for overseers to do to accommodate a dozen of them, but you've only got two. Using them well is vital to success. Overseers don't have to stay at a site once you've claimed it, so it's tempting to send them scurrying about claiming sites to give yourself more building options. Problem is, while you're wandering around the board, your opponents will take advantage of your absentee management by stealing from-- or even worse, taking over-- your sites. Leaving at least one overseer behind-- sometimes both, if you're building a particularly valuable pyramid-- is often wise. Don't overlook a skillfully timed raid on your opponent's sites. If you need three grey blocks to finish your pyramid and an opponent's gray pyramid is foolishly left underprotected, you can help yourself and hinder your rival in one fell swoop.
Moving your workers requires far less brainpower. If your overseers are at a site they can take over from an opponent, move enough workers there to do so. If you can't take it over, steal from it anyway-- why waste such a great opportunity to drag your opponent down? You might even get some good bricks in the bargain. If someone else has arrived at one of your sites and is threatening to take it over, get enough of your own workers there to prevent it. And if you have enough bricks of the right colors to finish a valuable pyramid, make sure you have enough workers at that site to do the job. Finishing a pyramid makes it safe, and doing so should be a very high priority. Not enough workers or movement points to cover all these bases? Hey, I didn't say it requires no brainpower.
Finally, there are decisions to be made when it comes time to lay bricks. If you can complete a solid-color pyramid, it's a no-brainer. If your pyramid has a unicolor base but you don't have more blocks of the same color, it might be a good idea to sacrifice a few points by building the next level in a different color. Far better to get a mixed-color pyramid finished than to have your unicolor masterpiece plundered by opponents. Sometimes you can complete an entire small pyramid in one turn for a quick profit. The most critical factor to consider, especially late in the game, is how many bricks you'll be leaving unused. Every unlaid brick gets added to the Great Pyramid and brings the game one step closer to its finish. When you're behind, every brick dumped in the center is a knife in your gut. But if you're ahead, electing not to use any of your bricks and instead adding them all to the Great Pyramid can be a brilliant way to lock in your victory.
Seems like I've given more of a strategy session than a review, but perhaps that speaks to the quality of Tal Der Könige better than any adjectives I could espouse. You don't sit down to a game of Tal Der Könige to have a rip-roaring good time. This game offers a somewhat more cerebral evening's entertainment. That's not to say it requires deep concentration or tip-top awareness, but it is unquestioningly a more "serious" game than, say, Inklings or Adel Verpflichtet. The moves of all the players interact with each other, so that every game takes on a unique character. This makes for a high degree of replayability. If Tal Der Könige were $40 it would be a crime for any gamer to be without a copy. With double that as its price tag, I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not it's worth adding to your collection.