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‘Thurn and Taxis’ by Karen and Andreas Seyfarth
When Dicken arrives at Kendall’s there is standing room only. Daughter Abigail is busily colouring a giant drawing on the dining / boardgame table. The longer the Ragnars wait, the more she colours. Time then to pass over some despatch documents for ‘Canal Mania’s that are even now winging their way across the pond. Dicken reports the first re-orders. Things are hotting up!
With the table finally clear, the Ragnars are able to set up Kendall’s latest game; ‘Thurn and Taxis’ – a generous birthday present from Dicken. Just as the cellophane is stripped off the playing cards, Roz arrives. She is alone! Derek is working and sister Kate is feeling under the weather – not surprising as she’s now working in a telephone call centre. How she must long for the sheep of New Zealand.
Roz reports that Derek has delivered x3 CMs to Games and Comics in Guildford, as promised – good man!. All goes well on the ‘Canal Mania’ front, except that Boardgamegeek is having hardware problems and is no longer recording the games very slow meteoric rise into the listings thereof.
Setting up is now a three-person job and is accompanied by a rendition of the rules by Kendall. The rules book is a mere four sides of A4, much of which is diagrams, examples and general information. None-the-less this is Kendall’s third reading and he still hasn’t quite worked out what all the tiles are for. Rio Grande can take some responsibility for this as (unusually) there are a few glitches in the rules – notably quite a few spelling errors and the absence of a picture of one tile type where (obviously) there should have been one. Ragnar Brothers can now sympathise with the frustrations of working with professional production companies.
The game production otherwise is singularly impressive, with the board being amongst the most handsome in anyone’s collection. There are cards and tiles as mentioned and a set of twenty wooden houses per player. The theme of the game is establishing postal services in Germany. Players create routes by drawing city cards and placing them in a line in their player space. These cards must correspond to adjacent cities on the board. When at least three cards are laid a player may ‘close’ the route and put houses onto the board in the appropriate cities. The closing of the route can win a player a tile for the length of the route (5, 6 or 7 cities) and may allow the player to up-grade his carriage (carriages start at three and rise to seven as routes of appropriate length are laid). Placing houses can win further tiles as a player controls cities in regions of the board. There is a points count up at the end to determine the winner. Of course there are quite a few extra rules along the way.
Roz is finding it difficult holding all the information in place at one time, Dicken keeps asking questions that demand reference to the rules book and Kendall is wishing he’d read a few more in-depth reviews on BBG - rather than just looking at personal comments. That said, it really isn’t a difficult game and its playing time is purportedly sixty minutes.
Kendall starts, drawing two cards as the ‘Postmaster’ role, one of which goes in his player space – Pilsen. End of his go. Roz draws two and places Zurich. Dicken draws two and places Augsburg. Good names to twist around in the mouth.
Dorittos, Pringles and dips are in abundance. Unfortunately, Dicken is replete and leaves Kendall and Roz to munch for the entire evening.
Roz completes a neat little three card route that takes her through Switzerland and into southern Germany. She places houses, draws the three point carriage and settles down to building a new route. Dicken’s completes a route that interweaves with Roz’s. Kendall meanwhile ploughs on to generate a massive seven card route which wends its way from the east through to the south of the board. This turns out to be a big mistake as he still only collects the three point carriage and spends the rest of the game playing catch up.
Kendall announces his butt is working – that’s his new water butt. Kendall is gradually turning green. Roz expresses disappointment with her butt as she’d hoped to attach a hose to it and sprinkle her lawn. Apparently a water butt doesn’t generate that amount of pressure.( ed. Any resemblance to a Benny Hill sketch is sincerely apologised for ).
The game moves on very pleasantly. There is unlikely to be falling out in this company anyway, but ‘Thurn and Taxis’ is hardly interactive. Players can virtually ignore what anyone else is doing and even if they don’t, there is only a limited amount they can do to affect anyone else’s play.
Consequently, Kendall is quietly fuming as he knows he can’t possibly beat Dicken to building the first seven point carriage, at which point the game will end (Dicken being the last player in the round). Dicken duly trundles home, collecting the one point tile for finishing the game. To make matters worse it turns out that the seven point carriage is worth ten victory points, whereas the six point hacks of Roz and Kendall are worth a meagre seven. Unbuilt houses are deducted from the carriage and tile total, giving Dicken 22 points, Kendall 13 points and Roz 9 points. All enjoyed the game and look forward to the next outing. Kendall still seethes over what he considers his fatal move – the early 7 point route.
Never mind. After all, England’s cricketers have just won another crushing victory against Pakistan and look to have a team that can now make a decent fist of defending the Ashes. Kendall and Dicken wax enthusiastically, but Roz (not a cricket fan AND from New Zealand) doesn’t join in. However, she does phone Derek to tell him the game is over and that Dicken won – more grist to Kendall’s mill.
‘Thurn and Taxis’ is highly thought of on BGG. Dicken felt that at first he thought it might resemble ‘Web of Power’ but was delighted to find that it did not - he considers ‘Web….’ to be deeply flawed. It will undoubtedly get played frequently at Games Nights as it’s a relatively easy game to introduce and is amiable. Admittedly nobody mentioned the postal service of old Germany during the game but rather referred to routes, cities and carriages simply as game elements, but the theme is a good one and the board is lovely. Whether it will go down a storm at Spiller’s bash in September is another question, but go down it will.
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