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Creative Incubation 2018-04-21

Lately our game group has been revisiting old games. This week a group of 5 experienced gamers tried Knizia's Taj Majal. We were all surprised at how well the game held up and intrigued with pursuing deeper strategies.

I'm not going to go through how to play the game or strategies but rather focus on two things: key mechanics in the game and how these mechanics mix to contribute to the game experience.

Mechanics

• The game has six suits which is an unusual number
  • four symetrical colors
    • Vizier, political, green
    • General, military, purple
    • Monk, religious, orange
    • Princess, social, yellow
  • Grand mogul, crown
  • Elephant, economic
• At the heart of the game there are two primary, competitive goals that are acquired in 12 consecutive auctions
  • Commodities
    • this is a pure aread control that is purely competitive; for every winner there is a loser
  • Network
    • This has potential for conflict but the competition isn't as necessary as with commodities
  • Both goals utilize an exponential scoring mechanism
  • commodities have the same auction order and thus the same scoring potential each game; network has vastly different scoring potential depending on the setup; missing a single commodity is known reduction in score but missing some network links can devastate a score.
• The card set
  • 100 cards
  • four colors that restrict bidding and also add to victory points
  • white cards that are wild and allow auction bids to be accelerated; worth more victory points
  • 4 special cards that are earned in earlier rounds; can be taken back into the hand after bidding and replayed in future rounds; future earnings by other players may steal them
  • distribution
  • 12 white/wild: 1 of each suit excet elephants; 7 elephants (very assymmetric)
  • 4 special
  • each card color
    • only four cards that have two non-elephant suits; two of each of the non-elephant suits; no repeated suits on a single card; arrangement is not identical on each card color
    • 14 cards that have an elephant paired with a non-elephant; two cards with crowns; 3 cards in each of the other four suits
    • 2 double elephant cards
• Bidding
  • in order, players make and add to their bids
  • withdrawling while leading in one of the suits is what wins one of the goals
  • wild cards and special cards can be played in addition to colored cards which accellerates the bid
  • withdrawling allows players to select two cards to replentish the hand; early withdrawls give a greater choice

Game Experience

Bluffing is a huge part of the game. Having a large hand and the perceived intention to play it to win can cause players to drop out and give you the victory.

The assymetry of networking vs commodities in a game is huge. In a rare game the network is ordered perfectly and allows a network winner to get a huge number of points. The network player still has to choose key points to withdrawl early to replentish the hand. This allows for sloppy design since the auction nature of the game, puts the responsibility on the players to choose the correct targets.

The end of game bonus for longest run of a single card color + white cards is a very large bonus. This has the nice effect preventing players from blowing their hand on the last round. This particular game is themeless but in a themed game this erases the illusion that players are building for a long lasting future and instead becomes an appocalyptic ending.

The nature of the colored cards is to pair two different of the six suits on each card. There are a few double elephant cards but these are rare. Since often the player just wants to win either elephants or a single other suit (and doesn't care which) this causes a frustrating amount of incidental conflict. There were rounds where one player says "I just want elephants" and the other bidder says "I just want a palace" yet neither one can drop out since they are not leading in the appropriate suits.

I really like the early withdrawl mechanic. It has a few effects:

• The game needs a significant number of auctions in order to allow a player to drop out of a number of them and still have a chance of winning the game.
• Removing players completely from an auction has a big affect on the round
  • the player may take the good cards which reduces the value of further dropping out
  • a low evaluation of the auction prize may increase; I've had rounds where I thought "I'll definitely drop out" but a couple early withdrawls by other players changes my mind.

I have heard that the game gets much more interesting when you start to look at which cards players draw to replentish their hands. I'll have to try this.

The network is fairly complex with four cities in most provinces and full connections in most places. The lack of connections in key areas is a little strange. In particular, the upper left side of the board is somewhat less connected.

The decision of which color to start an auction is huge. Getting rid of a minority color is helpful but limits your choices if the battle gets big. Our group felt the special card that allows a player to play any colored card is underpowered.

Special cards have some interesting properties

• they are earned by winning the four basic suits (non-crown, non-elephant) but the bonus does not help these basic suits. This gives players who want commodities incentive to play the purple suit just to win the elephant card
• I still haven't figured out how to win and/or keep these reliably; I've had games where I've had very few of these and games where I've had a wild card that hasn't been helpful; maybe working to get the card you want and then intentially drawing suits that would earn that card is a good strategy? This would give other players fewer chances to win this as well as give you a greater chance to win it back. Maybe targeting the acquisition of one of the basic suits is a best practice.

The game has a subtle relationship to randomness:

• the setup is certainly random but it happens at the beginning of the game and the information is complete
• The initial hand is random; this seems like the biggest random plus or minus given to any player in the entire game
• the flop of replentished cards is random but usually there is some good stuff; it's hard to know what other players will take and the order players drop out so it's hard to know what you'll get
• the unknown contents of other players hand makes auction battles very uncertain; this is an extra reason to avoid a large fight. The rules explicitly state that you can't tell another player about the contents of your hand so you cannot use this information to diffuse the tensions of an action fight.