Monday 24 November 2008

20th November - Taj Mahal (mini session report & review)

Last Thursday saw the outing of an old game, perhaps somewhat showing its age; just like a grey-haired grandpa (perhaps we'll call this theoretical grandpa Nigel) in a games nightclub surrounded by younger & fresher games...

Perhaps that's a bad analogy, but you get the idea. Taj Mahal shows a lot of signs of being an older Euro-game when compared to the Agricolas of today - however that isn't a bad thing. Amongst its simple rules lies a game of area control, tension & 'push your luck'.

The board shows 12 regions, each of which has 4 (I think!) cities to build a palace of your colour in. Create continuous chains of your colour into other regions from the current region, the better you score. To place palaces, you play 1 card a turn (plus a white special/standard card, if you wish) of one colour only per round. Each card have two symbols from; 4 persons, elephants or a grand mongul. To win anything you need the majority of at least one symbol compared to everyone else & then withdraw - depending on what you win, you can build palaces and/or take a region tile, both of which ultimately help you score points. When you claim two of the same person tiles, you get a special white card which grants you an unique bonus in the game until someone else is able to claim it off you with two of the same tiles.

The catch is, you have a limited number of cards in your hand &, as previously mentioned, you can only play cards in one colour only per round, so this is where the tension, bluffing & push-your-luck comes in - there were a couple of occasions when somebody would end up winning three of the contests & someone else won nothing. Many times I thought Taj Mahal was a game that Huggy & possibly Damen would have enjoyed taking part in the screwage aspect.

A fantastic game & I'm thankful to Michel for suggesting it.

As for the game we played; 5 of us in total played. Michel took an early lead by picking up a few region tiles & scoring multiple points for the different symbols on them; I wasn't far behind at the start, building a few connections into other regions & holding the special white card that score +2 points each time it was played - think I picked up about 10 points before I was claimed by just about everyone else! Keith was very quickly lagging behind & never really recovered. As the game progressed, I seemed to lose my way :-( as Andre overtook me & was jostling with Michel for the first spot. Ultimately, Michel's scoring of multiple points from his region tiles & small symbol tiles was the winning factor for him. Final scores approximately:-

Michel - 50
Andre - 45?
Matt - 33
Sam- 30?
Keith - 20?

Good game, should bring it again another time.

2 comments:

Michel said...

I agree with you that it's not necessarily bad for older games to feel different from newer ones. In fact, I'm beginning to be slightly bored of many games (Caylus, Agricola, Pillars, etc) reusing the same action selection mechanism to get resources that will build then other things that generate more resources. Taj Mahal is much more creative: a mix of poker-like card playing, of a connection game (to score palaces better), and set collection (increasing returns on the goods). No wonder it's still in the top 50 after 8 years...

Thanks for the report.

Michel said...

Uff! Finally I caught up with my backlog of session reports and managed to publish my own report on this particular session.