“Manage and rule all aspects of Ancient Rome with a clever action selection mancala.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102680/trajan
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Weight: Mid-to-heavy
Genre: Mancala-based Eurogame
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
One thing I have to caution people about Trajan is to not try to play it drunk. You see, the central action mechanism is a mancala, which is a series of 6 dishes, each of which has some number of colored token in it. Players take actions by taking all of the tokens from one dish and then placing them, one at a time, in other dishes in clockwise order. Each dish corresponds to a player action, and the player’s action for the turn is the action tied to the last dish they placed a peg in.
Players also get bonuses for dropping certain colors in certain dishes. The end result is a thinky puzzle where players have to balance claiming those bonuses with the action they want to take, and try to figure out how to set up the NEXT turn with where each peg ends up. A delightful challenge most of the time. A devil of a task with a couple beers in you.
The rest of the game is a relatively straightforward collection of euro minigames – a mixture of set collection and territorial control. But that’s a good thing, as there’s more than enough depth to the core mancala puzzle, certainly enough to make Trajan one of the very best games by one of the industry’s very best designers.
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