Imagine playing poker with a fixed pot. The winner gets $20. You anti $20/n (say $4 a player in a five player game). There's no betting. Very boring.
Let's change it. You can now bet. However money you get isn't put into a pot, it just ... disappears. You can now bluff and sometimes win a pot, but you have to pay a price (whatever a bet is). [In regular poker, of course, if you successfully bluff you get the full pot and your bet is returned].
Let's make things interesting. You keep your cards between hands, but lose cards for each bet you make. On your turn you must raise or fold, no calling allowed. And, after each hand, you must discard one card per bet. So if you have a great hand, you win pot after pot. You only get a few cards (not a full hand) when you ante.
Suppose you get a great poker hand. Full house. Your opponent keeps betting — presumably a bluff or a great hand. In real poker, you bet a lot of money. If he's bluffing, you win a lot. If he has a greater hand, you lose a lot. In my proposed variant ... if he has a bad hand, you lose value by having to call his bets and by having to toss away your cards after the hand. If he has a good hand, he doesn't get full value for it because you also had a great hand at the same time.
Sound like fun?
These poker rules describe Taj Mahal [Taj has several 'hands' going at once]. If someone fights with you, you both lose, no matter who had the better hand. The spoils (pot) are fixed, no matter if you spend two cards or twenty eight. Every bet costs you cards. You spend everything, win or lose, which encourages you to play one more card (since winning while spending 8 is better than losing while spending 6) leading to a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario.
Tactics, strategy, picking your fights — so unimportant as to be meaningless. Unlike poker, bets do not convey information (or mis-information, if bluffing). Laying out another card indicates — that you can and you are committed. [To be fair, dropping out indicates that you need/want more cards or this region doesn't score enough to be worth the risk]. Fun. Winning or losing depends on if other people make a stand against you or not, and who has the N+1st card.
Let's consider the clueless player. He makes a stand in a position he doesn't deserve to play in ... against you. In poker, he is to be lauded, because his loss is your gain. In Taj Mahal, his loss is your loss. You still win, of course, but have fewer cards than you should.
I see in a comment "How can one person be so right about Titan yet so wrong about Taj Mahal?!" Well, here's why Titan is so popular. In Titan, fighting a battle can help either player, or the players who are uninvolved. Anyone who fights hopeless battles against you helps you via points, recruiting, etc. In Taj they cost you the game, and the way to win is be sitting on the sidelines when everyone else goes at it Hammer and Tongs. "Let's you and him fight".
The board can't redeem the fundamentally flawed card system. And the board play is no great shakes compared to Web of Power, a game that takes half the time.
Update: Greg (in the comments) has the chutzpah to say it better than I did. "You win the game by avoiding fights. You have virtually no control over whether you get into a fight or not." I'll answer the rest of the comments in comments.
Your example of when the game fails is when a clueless/new player makes a bad decision, and it harms you.
This happens in all my favourite games. Puerto Rico, Modern Art, Java and several of my other favourites have this "flaw". This happens because the players have a fair amount of control over the game state, as it affects other players. What is also true about these games is they are absolutely wonderful when played with a set of very good players.
This may fail for having a game that is at once social, and appealing to a a few players who are also playing competitively. Settlers does this well, a keen strategist or two will fight for the victory, and the social clueless player will only notice they didn't quite win.
Taj Mahal is a wonderful and deep game when all the players are good. It also helps if everyone does a little card counting; most cards in hands are public (except the six you start with, and the bonus ones for quitting early). If you don't like it, cool, but it isn't fundamentally flawed. It is one of the best strategic gaming experiences we have in my gaming group.
I guess the similarity I see is that, in both games, to maximize your play, you have to identify the relative levels of cluelessness in your opponents and adjust to them. Now, because of the Fundamental Theorem of Poker, even if you assume your opponents are experts, you'll come out ahead against clueless opponents. This is generally not true in Taj Mahal or many, many other German games. I can see where preference would swing someone one way or the other; in my case, both Taj Mahal and No Limit Hold 'Em are "Top Shelf" games.
- d
First of all, a single round against a bad player may hurt you, but the bad player is likely to be hurt much more and then never recover. His ability to cause further damage during the game is basically over. Likely he will find the rest of the game boring - that is my one concession as to a problem with TM.
In any case, the real issue is battle between two good players, which will hurt both of them. This is a common mechanism in many games, certainly in hundreds of wargames, in SoC when two players fight over longest road, in many auction games, etc. I don't think this is inherently flawed. It just means you have to pick your battles AND ensure that after a long battle is over that you have a plan of recovery.
It sounds like you didn't have a plan of recovery, and therefore felt like you "wasted" cards during the battle. That is due to inexperience, imho. The battle you pick should always be one round before a province from which you plan to withdraw without playing, which allows you to quickly recover. And the battle should always be done only when you have a second color as backup and a bonus white card or two.
Nothing works out perfectly, of course, and that is where the tension comes from. If the game doesn't play well as a series of out-and-out slugfests, that doesn't mean there is something wrong with the game, only that the game doesn't play well as an out-and-out slugfest game. TM isn't.
Yehuda
You win the game by avoiding fights. You have virtually no control over whether you get into a fight or not.
It's that last sentence that's important and the one that few Taj Mahal defenders address sufficiently.
I strongly disagree with Yehuda's response that "the bad player is likely to be hurt much more and then never recover. His ability to cause further damage during the game is basically over." How so? The ability to cause damage is almost directly tied to the number of cards in hand and for the most part players are drawing the same number of cards each turn. Even if a bad player does draw fewer cards, he can still cause considerable damage by playing just 2 or 3 cards in a battle he will clearly lose.
a) The pot is worth different amounts to different players. It's possible a commodity is worth 4 or 5 points to me but 1 to you. That's an extreme example, but it's very unusual for the "pot" to be worth the same "$20" to everyone. To really compare to poker, you'd have to do something where I'm anteing $2 for a $20 pot and you're anteing $5 for the same pot that's only worth $10 to you. A subtle difference perhaps, but it changes the whole complexion of the comparison.
b) The value of cards is likewise variable and situational. By bidding 3 greens I could be essentially costing myself nothing, because that's my short suit, or a type of bid that's not central to my overall strategy.
Taj Mahal *looks* like poker. Sort of. But it isn't; it's not even that close. Poker is a game of bluffing and probabilities; mostly the latter. Taj Mahal is a game of evaluation and bidding, mostly the former.
As also pointed out, the clueless newbie can torpedo the game. But how many of the great euros is this true for? Tigris &Euphrates? Check. Puerto Rico? Check. Settlers of Catan? Check. Modern Art? Check. Need I go on? This is just evidence of the fact that you are playing with, like, other players, and what they do matters. This is, in general, a good thing. There is no bright line IMO between when having a newbie (or malicious player) able to torpedo you is a bad thing and when it's just a side-effect of a system that is interactive.
Lastly:
This is flat-out not true, and gets to the heart of Taj Mahal, which is after all an evaluation game. It usually pretty clear when a commodity, token, leader, or palace is going to be highly valuable to one or more players, and so when they are going to go to spend heavily to get it. If you go toe-to-toe with someone who has just ducked two provinces and has a fistful of cards over a commodity that's worth 4 to them and 1 to you and get beat, it seems to me you have only yourself to blame. Likewise going into a bid under-prepared and unable to demonstrate strength (either by having an imposing hand of cards or a very strong lead) is not a good thing either. These are extreme examples, but good play boils down to recognizing these situations in more subtle cases.
I'll mention one last thing ... because this is Knizia, there is also a counterbalancing factor that you didn't mention. There is actually a significant incentive in the game to drop early. The prime palaces, and with them key connectivity points and bonus tiles, will go to the player who drops early, rather than sticking it out for a slugfest. This is another key factor to recognize when bidding.
Two differences between the games you mention and Taj --
1) Taj stacks the deck in that you can't see when you'll plan this. In fact, it's a critical part of the game.
2) You can get hurt in the other game, but you don't tend to lose your resources when a player does something that hurts you/helps others. [In Modern Art, you don't pay when you lose, etc]
Here (as Greg so concisely mentioend) the conflict is unavoiable and unknowable at the game start.
The flaw of the weak player is a big deal in the other game, but they don't affect the central mechanism of the game.
I think that these problems are problems with the other games. However, for the most part, they aren't the central mechanism. Settlers isn't about building roads, it's about trading.
Here it's the central aspect of the game (the bidding fight).
Evaluation is important, and I did gloss over it. But plenty of Reiner's games have evaluation issues and varying values (Ra) that don't have the MAD aspect. The problem is intensified in that there are what, 12 rounds of bidding?
Part of the reason I used the poker analogy (and I prefer Greg's) is that back when I was discussing this with someone, Taj got compared to poker (which is when I initially thought of the 'worst poker game ever' analogy).
MAD occurs in the very first round, when all things are equal to all players (if not all cards). Here whether you get into a fight is really just a matter of what hands everyone happens to have, and the card counting aspect doesn't enter into it. All of the mitigating reasons you list later on are the fruits of this bad seed. If I play a card or two and nobody fights me, I drop out and get my reward. If I get into a conflict, I spend more, get less reward, or drop out and get nothing.
If, later on, someone fights me for something that's worth 4x as much to me as to them, I get punished in a way you even mention -- I can't drop out first and claim the best thing, because I have to take my time (as well as cards) fighting the bid. As you state:
So, if it's worth more to me, I play a Suit, someone matches it, I raise again, but player C (uninvolved, nobody matched his suit) has already dropped out and claimed my space. In a real auction game, I can't get frozen out (because I'll just raise the bid again), assuming the evaluation makes it profitable. Here, I don't have enough control to outspend everyone, because I can get matched while someone else doesn't.
Regarding Greg's comment, you respond:
I assume that your referring to the second part "you can't control when you get into a fight". I suppose the more accurate wording is "You can't control when a fight comes to you", but the fact is that fighting weakens you and costs time, at which point someone may win your "prime location" for less than you paid for sub-prime. Whee.
Sure, on the early turns it's possible to get a bit whacked by bad luck, but only generally if you actively decide to take a risk. For this reason, I find the luck in Tigris &Euprhates more arbitrary; in Taj you have a lot more management options, while in Tigris you are very constrained by your tile draw. As a game of Taj Mahal progresses, you gain more control. You watch what people who are competing with you are drafting, you target things other people aren't competing heavily for, you try to find the rhythm of the game.
Yes, the competition can be high-stakes at times, and late in the game you can get really burned. Losing a big late-game auction can be a game-loser; on the other hand, you most likely knew you were getting yourself into that situation by that point if you were paying attention. It's high-stakes, but it's certainly not arbitrary. Generally, you decide to take the risk, have options to cut your losses and tools to increase your chances, know that it's coming several turns in advance, and have considerable control over when and how to fight.
If you're going to advance the argument that the game is fundamentally flawed, I see only one context in which it makes sense: if you haven't played enough to pick up on the patterns and balances and how to evaluate the items. In all honesty, that may be reasonable; I certainly think a game can be *too* subtle, in that it takes more work to learn how to play than seems reasonable - it took me at least half-a-dozen plays (at least) to appreciate the game. I certainly don't personally think Taj Mahal falls into that category, given the replayability; but it may for others. In any case I wouldn't call that a *fundamental* flaw, however.
Anyway, sorry I missed until just now your bit where you say you would brook no argument on the fact that this game is fundamentally flawed, I could have saved myself some effort.