There are times in which I am in the mood for a hearty game and nothing else will do—a game which is going to take some time and thought. Trajan is Stefan Feld’s latest offering of red meat for tabletop gamers. Weighing in at a hefty two-and-a-half hours of game play, this is not a game to be started on a whim. However, don’t be daunted. It isn’t an impossible game to learn, and for many gamers it will sate that meaty urge.
Trajan is loosely designed around the life of a Roman household. (What’s up with Rome these days? Rome is the new pirates for game designers.) I say “loosely” because, like Dominion, the skin seems interchangeable on Trajan. Trajan is actually a collection of six or seven different mini-games, which when put together make a complete whole. Players work to advance their position in these mini games and ready themselves for each of four scoring rounds. Much like Agricola, it is very difficult for players to dominate each and every piece of the board.
One of the best features Trajan has to offer is its system for deciding which of the mini-games you will participate in during your turn. Each player has a board with six bowls pictured on it. Each bowl represents one of the six mini-games available on the board. At the beginning of the game, players place two different colored markers in each bowl. On their turn, players pick up one bowl of markers and then place them one-by-one in a clockwise manner in subsequent bowls. The last bowl in which they put a marker denotes the action they will take for that turn. There are also bonus action tiles which are sometimes placed above the bowls. If the player can get the right colored markers in the bowl in which they place their final marker, they can also take the action on the bonus tile along with their regular action. Much of the strategy in the game comes from using the right combinations of markers in the player bowls to generate bonus actions on the board.
The mini-games on the board offer a variety of worker placement, set collection, and resource collection activities. Scoring happens throughout the game, but four times each game players can lose points if they have not successfully collected the resources needed. At the end of the game, a final round of bonus scoring is added to the players position on the board to determine the winner.
There are two key problems that hold Trajan back from standing out above other games of this type. First, the various mini-games on the board are deeply siloed with little to no interaction between them. They have little influence on each other, except to provide points to the same scoring track. This lack of interaction between the components of the game makes them feel like… well, mini-games, instead of the coherent game they are supposed to be.
The second problem with the game is similar to the first. There is little player interaction in the game. In some ways, it is a two-and-a-half hour game of competitive solitaire. This might be fine in a game which played in half-an-hour. However, Trajan can drag during the extended middle of the game. In the last game I played, I repeatedly found myself looking at my twitter feed only to look up when it was my turn. This lack of interaction between players is the game’s greatest weakness.
That said, I do enjoy Trajan, when I am in the right mood. I love the mechanics which drive the player choices in the game, and I always like a game which requires the player to strategize based upon endgame scoring. It makes it much more difficult to assess who is winning as the game goes along. These characteristics alone will make Trajan enjoyable to many gamers who have more patience for event night games than I do.
Trajan is available in the United States from Passport Game Studios.
My thanks to Joe Wasserman, John Jacob, and Connie Rehfuss for helping me play test Trajan at Gamestorm. A review copy of Trajan was provided by Passport Game Studios.
