Rome Enough

Trajan is one of designer Stefan Feld's most highly regarded board games. I played it a few times many years ago -- so long ago that I'd forgotten the experience. I assumed that as much as I enjoyed Feld's other games, this one simply didn't stack up next to the others for me personally. That's an assumption I recently confirmed in revisiting the game.

Trajan is a game about Ancient Rome, but not really simulating any one aspect of Roman life in particular. You engage in trade (as the rules define it; not with other players), political intrigue, military domination (against the game; not directly against other players), and more. You build up your own personal tableau and try to amass more points than your opponents over several rounds.

This game was published in 2011, and pulling it out to play it now shows a lot about how far graphic design has come in just the handful of years since then. The board is divided into multiple sections where, essentially, a "mini-game" of sorts is being played. Each section has its own tiny rules you need to remember, and there's no player aid provided for that purpose -- no shorthand iconography on the board, no reference card for you to keep handy. The sections aren't even made to look all that distinct; the overall aesthetic feel of the board was valued more over any of that.

I feel that in many ways, that visual read is reflective as the game as a whole. There are a lot of aspects to Trajan that I find quite compelling on their own... but they don't really fit together for me. There are clever mechanisms, to be sure, but I feel like the game doesn't focus on any one of them enough.

For example, take the game's central action-taking mechanism: it's essentially the classic game of Mancala. Each player has a personal board with six spaces arrayed in a circle, each of the six representing the ability to take an action in a different area of the main board. On your turn, you pick up all the tokens from one space, then drop them one-at-a-time in a clockwise pattern around your circle. Wherever your last piece drops, that's the action you take. You really have to plan ahead, thinking not just about your next action, but what that will then allow you do do for the action after that -- because every move changes the number of pieces in your spaces, which in turn changes where the last piece will land when you pick up a group.

I find this a super-compelling way to constrain actions in a strategy game like this. It's very challenging to plan for the impact that your decisions will have down the road, and it's a challenge I welcome. It really encourages and rewards chess-like thinking about the consequences of your actions. But there's an extra wrinkle in this system that I think the game doesn't make the most of: the 12 pieces you use on your personal "Mancala board" are two pairs in six different colors. Each space can have a building tile near it calling for two particular colors of tokens. If you end your movement in a space with a tile, and that space has the two colors the tile calls for, you build the tile and get its bonuses.

That too is a compelling idea, adding a new wrinkle for you to have to plan around. Except that you don't end up planning around it all that much. You begin the game with three building tiles, and there is a mechanism for gaining more. But it's a somewhat difficult mechanism, to a degree that unless you make building a focal point of your game, you'll probably only build one or two more tiles beyond the three you start with -- if any extras at all. The color aspect to these tokens seems like it's going to be a huge deal when you're learning about this game's spin on Mancala. For most players, though, it seems like "not so much."

The mini-games of the central game board are similarly areas where lots of rules suggest big strategic implications on the game. But this is, at its core, one of those Euro games where "you can't do everything, and you should focus on just one or two things." So in a four-player game, you and one opponent might be focused on this vaguely "light cycle-ish" kind of area of barrier building at the center-right of the board, while two other players are focused mainly on this set collection mini-game next door. Someone might invest in this area control/movement section at top of the board, while others are drawn to a "king of the hill" system at the bottom.

You have to learn how all these rules work, all these games within the larger game of Trajan. And I suspect that for many, this would be a huge appeal: "Trajan is never quite the same game twice! What you do next time might be completely different than what you did this time!" I feel like its more a case of a few too many intriguing systems all getting in each others' ways -- a game where not all the players are actually made to compete against each other at all times.

I would play Trajan again, mainly for that intriguing Mancala-like core in the design. But revisiting the game, I now can understand how so many years went by since the last time I played. Compared to other, more focused Stefan Feld games, this one feels a little too kitchen-sink-ish to me. I give Trajan a B-.