Thurn and Taxis, published by Rio Grande, is an interesting and fun board game for 2-4 players that involves players building postal routes in the 17th century.  You do this by playing cards that represent cities on the game board.  They must be adjacent, of course.  When a route is built and scored, houses a played in cities based on particular rules.  This serves to get towards various bonus goals that give one points.  As you build larger routes, you get better mail carriages that are also worth incrementally more points each.  The game ends when a player gets the largest carriage or runs out of houses.  This keeps the game length to about an hour.

The rules of the game are fairly simple, but there are a number of small "note" type rules that are rather important to the game (like if you can't play a card on to the route you're currently building you have to discard your entire route or if you don't have any cards you have to draw two). The game play, for our first game, was very quick.  If we get a chance to play more, I imagine Laurie and I could pound out a couple of games in an hour.

One interesting aspect to this game is that it doesn't really have the direct conflict aspect like some games.  About the only thing you ever run in to conflict with is if you happen to take a card that's showing that your opponent wanted.  Other than that, it's just a race to get points first.  Most of the points come in the form of bonus point piles where the first one to get that particular bonus gets more points than the next and so on.  Since the first person to run out of houses or get the biggest carriage causes the game to end at the end of the round it's also a race to build long routes (to use up your houses) and build them quickly (to get to the big carriage first).

Some may say that this makes it a "solo multi-player" game, but it doesn't totally come out that way.  You do need to watch what the other players are doing so you can try to gauge how much time you have on your strategy or if you should go after one type of bonus rather than another because some else will beat you to one. However, it's also good because you don't have to pay as careful attention if you don't want to.  In fact, our first game had many distractions with a couple of people around that weren't playing that game at all.

Laurie and I will definitely be playing more of it, though.  We enjoyed it and expect it fit the shorter and more casual game role.  Setup does take a little bit of time because the bonus piles have to be sorted out and place, as well as some cards. I can't tell yet if it will get boring, though, since it doesn't have the depth or variety of play like some games (such as Runebound or on the lighter side, Caylus).

Posted by Shane on December 14, 2006 11:42 PM | Permalink