Thurn And Taxis board game components
Thurn and Taxis is a Euro board game that’s somewhat like Ticket to Ride. In addition to building routes, players also explicitly dominate regions.
Your options are determined through a deck of cards, each representing a region on the board. Each turn, you can play a card to add a route in the region specified on the card. As your routes grow, you can score them, and as your routes connect cities, you can score them, as well.
One interesting strategic concern lies in timing which routes you score. You can score them early (thus locking them in) or wait and try for a higher score.
Moreover, Thurn and Taxis contains many different ways to score and win the game. This dramatically increases your strategic options, and helps to make the game a little less directly competitive.
Indeed, players of Thurn and Taxis compete less directly than they do in, say, Ticket to Ride. For example, one player can’t block another player’s route. However, you score more points if you claim a region first, so the game becomes more of a race than a fight.
Because the board contains a small number of cities, the game ends pretty quickly. Time-strapped players, take note: a game of Thurn and Taxis takes about one hour.
Overall, I found this to be a deeply strategic yet easy to learn (and set up!) game.