A game about Buddhism with inner pieces
TAJUTO
Designer: Reiner Knizia | Artists: Damien Colboc, Maxence Burge
There’s been a new movement in games over the last year or two, with titles that are more about the way they make you feel than about winning. So hearing that Reiner Knizia’s latest is about maintaining mindfulness while constructing Buddhist pagodas, and the winner is the one who attains the highest level of spirituality shouldn’t be a surprise. He is, after all, the master creator, the most prolific game designer of all time.
Unfortunately, we’re not going to learn if the market is ready for games of mental calm because in Tajuto ‘meditation’ and ‘spirituality’ aren’t things you feel, they’re numbers you try to increase. Specifically they’re currencies.
There’s a subset of Eurogames that follow the same meta-structure, with two currencies. The first comes easily, and players have to work out how to spend it in the most efficient way to gain the second currency, which are often victory points. It’s not a new design (Catan uses the same template) and in fact it’s a bit long in the tooth. And in a nutshell, that’s what Tajuto is.
Knizia knows this of course. In the language of games mechanics, he is the closest thing there is to Shakespeare: eloquent, innovative, multi-influenced, influential, and prolific. He’d be the first to tell you this is not a game that will help you along the eightfold path. The theme is a wrapper, no matter how pretty the bits in the box – and they are pretty.
You start the game with three tiles in front of you, each with three possible actions on it. Activate a tile to use one of its actions, except that two of the tiles cost mediation points so you can’t use them until you’ve got some. The actions are: spend meditation points to buy a new tile, which gives extra actions, or bonuses, or spirituality points, or the chance to score if a particular pagoda gets finished; or place an offering in a pagoda, which earns meditation points; or draw a piece of a pagoda from the bag.
The pagodas are at the heart of the game. You build them. There are eight, and each one has six floors of declining size, and all of these 48 bits of plastic start off in a bag. You can usually identify which floor you want by touch, but you’ve no idea what colour you’re going to get.
You can also place a piece on a pagoda for free, as long as its colour matches, and complete one of eight possible objectives that score bonus points. You can only keep one pagoda-layer in your hand at a time.
For a game about spirituality, it’s surprisingly material. The gameplay is solid: it’s clever without being inspired, and there’s no dazzling innovation here, but it is perfectly balanced, intriguing and strategic.
It doesn’t start well, forcing you into drawing and placing pagoda pieces for the first few turns to gain enough points to do anything else, but once it’s into Act 2 then every choice is an interesting one, and you’ll spend lots of time calculating the odds of drawing a pagoda-piece you want and basing your strategy on that.
It’s not Knizia at his strongest but it’s thoroughly entertaining and doesn’t outstay its welcome. If you can get past the way you acquire and spend ‘meditation points’ like they’re £20 notes, there’s plenty to enjoy here.
JAMES WALLIS
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Gameboard
◗ 8 pagodas (6 floors each)
◗ Cloth bag
◗ 4 monk meeple
◗ 32 offering cubes
◗ 12 action tiles
◗ 15 wisdom tiles
◗ 4 transcendence tiles
◗ 6 additional action tiles
◗ 8 objective tiles
◗ 8 inauguration tiles
◗ Rulebook
WE SAY
If you like Knizia games then this is the sort of thing you’ll like. If you haven’t tried a Knizia game then it’s about time you did.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… TIKAL
Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling’s masterpiece of exploring central-American ruins has you building multi-storey ziggurats, though with less talk of spirituality.