Trajan: Lend me your ears and some votes

I recently played Trajan a couple of times, and I’ll admit it … it’s pretty fantastic. It’s a Stefan Feld game, and, honestly, I don’t have much experience with his games, as my favorite board-game designer is Uwe Rosenberg. I feel like serious board-gamers have their go-to guy who they’re just obsessed with: Rosenberg, Feld and Bruno Cathala, who designed Five Tribes.

Anyway, before we start talking about Trajan, I’ve entered a board-game contest with Passport Game Studios. Please vote for my photo; the contest ends at April 29, 2016, at midnight. Vote here through this link. Thanks, friends!

Trajan is a 2-4 player game that plays about 90 minutes. It’s your typical “point salad” that many Feld games are often referred to as. That means there’s a lot of different ways to score victory points. The game runs through the course of a year, which is divided into four quarters. Each quarter is split into four rounds on the time marker. The person with the most victory points after one year wins the game.

Each player receives a player mat, which has spaces for collected tiles and an action circle, which I think is the coolest mechanic of this game. The game begins with players randomly placing two action markers on their action circle, which represents the six actions you can take during your turn. There is also a larger main player board that match the six actions on the player mat.

Trajan in its most basic, basic form is picking up all the action markers in one tray and moving them one by one around the circle. Where you stop determines which action you will take for your turn. The more spaces you move on along the action circle, the more spaces the time marker moves. Every rotation of the time track is a round, and four rounds equal a quarter of the year. At the end of a round, a demand tile is flipped over. At the end of each quarter, players must meet those three demands or lose victory points.

There are six different actions you can take on the action circle:

1. Seaport
2. Forum
3. Military
4. Trajan
5. Senate
6. Construction

When taking the Seaport action, players must choose one of four options:

• Draw 2 commodity cards from the face down pile, add them to their hand, and then discard 1 card.
• Pick the top commodity card from one of two discard piles and add it to their hand.
• Play 1 or 2 cards from their hand face up in front of them (this will go toward end-game bonuses).
• Ship commodities card from one of the three ships. The first person to use a ship to ship commodities cards gets victory points, and then the ship is flipped over to the gray side. The next person who uses that ship gets fewer VPs. The three ships have different requirements that need to match what the player is shipping. All shipped commodity cards are then placed face up in front of the player to potentially score at the end of the game.

When taking the Forum action, the player takes a tile of their choice from the Forum section of the main board. These tiles can be bread, games, religion or bonus actions. Bread, games and religion tiles go toward meeting demands at the end of the quarter.

The next action is Military. Players can choose one of three options:

• Player places one of their small legionnaires from their mat to the military camp on the main board.
• Player moves their military leader to an adjacent province and takes a tile if there’s one available.
• Player can more their legionnaire to where their leader is sitting (if none of their own legionnaires are already there) and gain victory points for that province.  Only one of each player’s legionnaires can be in a province.

The fourth action is the Trajan action. When taking this action, players can choose a Trajan tile on the main board and put that new tile where their Trajan Arch is sitting on their action circle. Then, the Arch is moved over to the next available space on their mat. Trajan tiles provide bonus actions when a player stops in the action space and has action markers that match the Trajan tile. When you accomplish a Trajan tile, you remove it from the action circle, gain its benefits and leave it off to the side.

The fifth action is the Senate action. When you take this action, your player marker moves along the Senate track to gain victory points. At the end of the quarter, the person who had advanced the most on the Senate track (in addition to their Senate tiles) gets to pick the first bonus tile for end-game scoring. The second person picks the next bonus tile, but it will be flipped over to the gray side, which gives fewer VPs.

The last action is the Construction action. Players can choose one of two options:

• Players move a legionnaire from their personal supply to the worker camp on the main game board.
• Players move a legionnaire from the worker camp to a construction site, which has … you guessed it, more tiles! You gain the VPs on the tile, which moves on to your player mat. Players can choose any location when they first place a legionnaire. Subsequent workers have to be horizontally or vertically adjacent to another one of their workers.

Players put the acquired construction tile on their player mat; if it’s the first of its kind, that player gets a bonus action. Collecting sets of 3 or 4 of the same tile nets 10 or 20 points for that player.

At the end of each quarter (which is four rounds on the time marker), VPs are lost if demands are not met.  The Senate track is resolved, and then tile slots are refilled on the main board. Ships are reset to their colored sides. At the end of the game, VPs are assigned for a whole bunch of things, hence the yummy “point salad.”

• 1 VP for commodity card on hand
• 1 VP for worker in worker camp
• 1 VP for legionnaire in military camp
• 1 VP for a Trajan tile on player’s action circle
• 10 VPs for set of 3 of the same construction tile
• 20 VPs for set of 4 of the same construction tile
• VPs for completing end-game bonus tiles.

And that’s Trajan in a nutshell! As you can see, there are many different ways to score VPs. The part I enjoy about it most is the action circle, where you have to carefully plan you moves and drop the necessary colored action marker in order to complete a Trajan tile. My friends and I laugh that when we play this, we’re all hunched over on our table uber focused on our action circle, plotting and counting in a circular manner. It’s great fun and such a brain burner.

Folks of the Internet, which Feld game should I try next and why?

P.S. If you’ve made it all the way down here, here’s an outtake from my desert photo shoot.