Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
THURN ANDTAXIS - A family game that delivers!, 13 Jun 2009
Durability:4.0 out of 5 stars Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars Educational:3.0 out of 5 stars
I rate Thurn & Taxis 8/10 on Boardgamegeek, where its average rating is over 7/10. T&T won the main Spiel des Jahres prize in 2006, the biggest honour in the boardgame industry. It is a solid family game, quick and easy to play, but you need some plotting and planning to win.
Thurn und Taxis is a famous family, that's one surname 'Thurn und Taxis'. They built a vast postal system across Europe, and that's what you do in the game. The board shows a lot of towns and cities linked up in old German provinces, and there's a deck of cards to match each location. You take cards from an open display, add to your postal route, and then cash it in to place your post-houses on the board. Each route you build must be correct according to the map, so if you can't add to it properly, it's bust and you have to scrap it and start a fresh route.
When you fill a province with your post-houses, you take scoring chits with Victory Points (VPs), which go down in value. So the first to fill one province gets say 3 VPs, the next player to complete that province gets 2 VPs and so on. You also get points for building long routes, and each time you build a longer route, your postal company gains more VPs. There are other bonuses and at the end, most VPs wins.
You have some helpers in the game, you can use anyone once each turn. These let you take an extra card, or play an extra card, or claim a route is longer than you laid, or you can clear the display and see 6 fresh cards if there's nothing you want.
There's a neat trick in the game too. When you place your post-houses, you can can put them all from one province in your route, or you can put one house in each province in your route. This is crucial to building your route. You can visit the same place twice, but this is a waste of your turn. You want to build fresh routes and hit new places, but do you zig-zag around getting lots of provinces, or do you run straight in one province? You have lots of choices in T&T, you need to plan ahead, but it's a simple game to play.
I really enjoy playing Thurn & Taxis. The components are excellent, wooden pieces, detailed graphics (each town is drawn historically accurate!). The game-play is quick and easy to learn, but you have choices to make and a race to win VPs. The game is not aggressive, you do not get attacked or eliminated. Kids can learn a bit of geography and history, and they can easily compete with parents. Thurn & Taxis is a good example of the modern eurogames from Germany. You will want to play it again, try different tactics, which makes it great value. Plus, there are two expansion sets that add to the game; T&T Power And Glory Thurn and Taxis: Power and Glory Expansion and T&T All Roads Lead To Rome Thurn and Taxis: All Roads Lead to Rome.
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