Palace Planning

Every once in a long while, the board game Maharaja makes its way out of my game closet and gets a run... as it did this past weekend, for example.

It's an interesting little game where players try to build palaces and houses around a board (representing different cities and villages in India). It shares a lot of common game elements with other German fare, but synthesizes them together in an interesting way. For example, all players plan their turns simultaneously, in secret, but then execute them in a fixed order. Consequently, an early player's turn can mess up a late player's plans.

Players also have "jobs," much in the manner of Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy, or other such games. But instead of picking a new job by default every turn, your role is persistent from one turn to the next. Until you spend an action to change your job (or another player spends one of his actions to take it from you), you get to keep your role, and the special game power associated with it -- a small but significant twist on the whole job-picking game mechanic.

The game has enough things you can do in a turn to counter-balance turn order. The player who pulls out ahead early isn't necessarily going to win, nor is the player who falls behind early necessarily going to lose.

But unfortunately, the endgame often fizzles -- as it did on this recent play. Your goal is to construct seven palaces to win. Palaces are expensive, so prohibitively so that building more than one per turn isn't realistic. In fact, there are a few turns where you won't be able to build any.

And therein lies the problem. I said that early turns aren't always an indicator of who will win. But every time I've played, it always seems to reach the last turn, where one player -- and only one player -- has built six palaces already, and has enough money in front of him to build the winning seventh on his next turn. His victory is a foregone conclusion, so everybody can just start packing up the game without actually playing that last turn. An oddly anti-climatic ending to a game, particularly when you consider that so many other German board games have some form of epic "final scoring" to throw the standings into a little chaos.

The flaw is not enough to make me dislike the game, but it is enough to keep me from wanting to play it regularly. And so Maharaja will now vanish back to the bottom of the game closet for another several months, perhaps to make its way back out some time next year.