Belly Up at the Tavern

Deck building games have been around long enough now for game designers to introduce quite a variety of innovations to the genre. One of the more prevalent is to build pools of things other than decks of cards, like dice or tokens. It's almost novel just to see one of these games get back to cards, as with the recent The Taverns of Tiefenthal. Still, this is a game with other elements in the mix too.

Players each control a village tavern, trying to attract and serve patrons over a series of rounds. Each round begins with players revealing cards from the top of their personal deck until every table in the tavern is filled with patrons. On the way to doing that, you may reveal servers, dishwashers, even more tables -- a variety of things that can help you in the current round. Players then roll four dice and begin a drafting process, taking one and then passing the remainders to the next player. By matching up patrons to specific die values, you earn more money to expand your tavern with new cards. A second resource, beer, is spent to attract new patrons into your deck -- cards that can earn you more money in subsequent rounds.

There are a couple of tweaks to the expected deck builder systems. Cards you acquire are placed not in the discard pile to be used later, but on top of the deck where they'll come into effect on the very next round. In addition, each player has a personal board with lots of built-in, flippable tiles, each one representing a specific upgrade you can purchase to help you out along with your cards.

But despite the clear trappings of deck builders, The Taverns of Tiefenthal actually feels more like a drafting or worker placement game as you play. That dice selection element is very significant in the course of play -- you definitely want to be looking "upstream" to other players, to see what might get passed to you next as you consider what to pick now. You definitely want to be aware of what your growing engine is capable of producing, and plan accordingly -- you can definitely get paid by cards that want die numbers no one else is as eager to draft.

It also doesn't feel too much like a deck builder because there isn't that much variety in the cards. Where most modern deck builders have large collections of dozens of cards, this hearkens back to Dominion, where there are really only a few types of things in the mix. Although they're shuffled and recirculated like in a deck builder, they otherwise feel like the tools and abilities you gain access to in other kinds of Euro games.

The result is a custom cocktail, subtly different from other games -- and different even from the other "pool building" game from designer Wolfgang Warsch, The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Quacks has grown on me a bit since my initial review, though I still feel like there's a little more room to explore different strategies here in Taverns. With each game we've played thus far, we discuss afterward how one particular element might be the most important thing to focus on in play; we learn in the next play, from someone who did that to too great an extreme, that it isn't really the case. There's a finesse to Taverns that for now at least feels like it will be fun to master.

There's also a series of mini-expansions included in the game, gradually fleshing out the game with more mechanics. We've added some, but have yet to add them all, so there will be more discovery there too. (Yet the game does a good job feeling complete even without them.)

I give The Taverns of Tiefenthal a B+. It's managed to make it back to the gaming table a couple times since my friend introduced it, a strong sign in the constant stream of solid new releases. We'll see if it continues to pop up.