I’ve been on a Feld kick lately and Trajan is my favorite of his games that I’ve played (those being In the Year of the Dragon, Macao, Castles of Burgundy, and Trajan). Trajan is definitely heavier then Castles of Burgundy. It takes a bit longer to play, is more likely to cause analysis paralysis, and has more systems going on in it so it’s harder to teach.
The central mechanic is essentially a mancala board. You pick up all your tokens in one slot, and place one in each subsequent slot in a circle. The final one you place activates an action. As a consequence, you can’t necessarily perform whatever action you want each round. It depends on how many tokens are in each mancala slot. And as you make a move, you set up the board for your next turn by dropping tokens in each slot before the final one. This will change which actions are accessible and inaccessible next round. As a consequence, there’s quite a bit of planning in Trajan. A lot of the game is setting up crazy combos that explode into awesome happiness down the road. So you may have 2-3 low key turns, but they’re all in the service of setting you up to perform a super powered action where you get 50 points. This makes the pacing a lot like Castles of Burgundy, but I think requires more thinking about turns in the future.
The randomization mostly comes from board setup. The board is randomly setup every game and it can really change the worth and strategy of using various actions. Interestingly, I don’t think the various actions are balanced to all be equally worthwhile, so a big part of the strategy is figuring out how to minimize the actions you don’t want while maximizing the actions you do. The board is also randomly setup again four times in the game (similar to CoB’s rounds). The nice thing about this is you can’t actually plan too much. A few turns out can help you a lot, but a player thinking 20 turns ahead doesn’t have enough perfect information to win on that ability alone.
Each of the actions in the game ends up being its own little mini-game. This is where the biggest teaching hurdle comes in. If you look on board game geek entry under the mechanics section, you’ll see way more mechanics then any sane game would contain. Each of them is simply implemented and easy to understand if you’re someone who plays board games. But if you try to teach someone who strictly plays Settlers of Catan, you may have trouble getting them to understand all of the components.
Each of the individual mini-game actions are too simple to be interesting on their own. In some BGG reviews, this has lead people to criticize the game as a series of uninteresting, unrelated side games. However, all the mini-games are in fact related through the mancala board. A player constantly has to weigh the possible benefits of each of the mini-games against each other and in what order works best, then try and manipulate the mancala board to achieve that.
I think Trajan has the best theme of the Feld games I’ve played. That’s not really saying much. The theme certainly isn’t that powerful. But the board is quite beautiful and each of the various actions at least seem like sensible things a roman senator would be concerned with. Generally, my friends and I like laughing at the mechanic where roman citizens demand things from the senators, but the victory point loss is often low enough that they’re worth ignoring.
My girlfriend and I regularly play the game 2-player. It and Troyes are currently our most played 2-player games. I’ve also played it a few times 3 and 4 player, and it scales really well to all number of players.
On that note, Castles of Burgundy fans may want to consider checking out Troyes as well. It’s another dice driven Euro-game, but with a Worker Placement focus. It also has quite a bit more player interaction since you can buy your opponent’s dice before they use them.
