Thurn und Taxis
Posted by Rob Herman at August 24th, 2006
One of my few acquisitions at GenCon was a copy of the recent Spiel des Jahres winner Thurn und Taxis. (In English it’s for some reason translated “Thurn and Taxis,” which makes no sense because Thurn und Taxis is a family name.) The SdJ is a prestigious yearly award given to an outstanding family-style German boardgame (so the most complex games don’t tend to win.) I myself find the SdJ winners hit-and-miss (Settlers of Catan, El Grande, and Carcassone are great; I don’t much care for Alhambra, Elfenland, or Tikal) but Thurn und Taxis is by the designer of the excellent game Puerto Rico, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
(How El Grande won the SdJ while Puerto Rico didn’t—presumably it was deemed to complex, but El Grande seems crunchier to me—is a mystery. More information about the SdJ.)
Anyway, the idea of T&T is that you build routes from city to city in a large network. The map is divided into several regions. You gain points for hitting every city in a province or pair of smaller provinces; you also gain points for building routes of a certain length. The catch in play is that you can only connect cities that you have a corresponding card for, which you pick from a “menu” of six; the catch in scoring is that the score for each goal reduces with every player who completes it. So, for instance, the first player to connect every province in Bayern (Bavaria) gets 5 points, but the third gets only 3.
Similar games: While mechanically T&T is very different than Puerto Rico, and it is much lighter, the elegance of the rules feels very much the same. Also like in Puerto Rico, a player can work towards bringing the game to an end earlier if that would be advantageous. It’s often compared to Ticket To Ride. In theme and mechanics they are indeed similar; T&T has more of a focus on efficiency and is less confrontational, and you focus more on your own route than competing with your opponents. It is reminiscent of Elfenland in the “trying to hit all the stations” sense, but feels much “cleaner” and frustratingly luck-bound than that game.
Strengths: The game is simple and the rules seem incredibly natural. There are four “special actions” you can choose from every turn, and it seems completely obvious that these are the four that should exist. The conflict that occurs is mostly in a “racing” rather than “competing for resources” sense, so hostility and aggression are minimal. There is plenty to think about and the strategy is reasonably deep, but as long as you avoid the deadly pitfall of having to discard a partial route, you’ll be competitive. There’s a strong sense of seeing your plans come to fruition, which is a big payoff for me. Like in Puerto Rico, there are several different broad strategies that can be effective; deciding which one will keep you away from competition and works with the cards available is a key to victory.
Weaknesses: Player interaction is pretty minimal. If the opposition is particularly soft or nonconfrontational it could feel like Solitaire. More so than Puerto Rico, one game plays pretty much like the next.
After playing a few more games of T&T, I’m very divided over it’s interactivity. On the one hand, you make relatively few decisions based on the actions of the other players. On the other hand, you have to order your goals so as to hit objectives before the other players, so the few decisions you do make based on the other players are important. Finally, the reason the game really doesn’t feel like solitaire is that although 90% of the time, the other players are choosing cards based solely on their own position, there’s still a great deal of suspense - are they going to pick up the card you need, or flush the pool when something you need is showing? It also helps to keep track of how many of the particular card you need are still in the deck, so you’re always planning and calculating, which makes it feel like the other players actions are noteworthy. So, while the game is not a masterpiece of interactivity like Taj Mahal or Puerto Rico, I’d have to say that it’s an essentially solid game.
I also noticed that determining when your opponents will be able to end the game is a huge deal. The difference between being stuck with a 6-card route and not could definitely swing the game.
I used to think that going first was a huge advantage because you get first crack at the initial cards and you will win “ties” for any given province. I still think it’s an advantage, but now I think that going later–and not being forced to close out your routes early because an opponent _might_ choose to end the game–is a balancing advantage.