Maharaja surprised me quite a bit, the first time I played it. I knew few games back then, and was amazed by the dynamic aspect of the design. The good looks of Phalanx's production didn't hurt either, and for a while the game remained among my favorites. About two hundred other games later, and around a dozen matches of this title, I'm not as excited as I once was about this game, but it's still a worthy design and I enjoy playing now and then.

 

This is essentially an area-majority racing game: players compete to be the first one to build all seven palaces they have in their personal stock. To do so, players need money, and they get money by fighting area-majority battles (in which the palaces themselves help win, but not too much) throughout the board. Players decide their actions simultaneously using disks and have them resolve in player order, with the players going last having bigger bonuses than the ones going first.

 

What's surprising about the game at first is the amount of freedom the game gives the players: movement is free (as long as you pay for it, which isn't the paradox it sounds like), and you can split up your actions freely as well, as in first-half-of-action-A, action B, then second-half-of-action-A. The only punishment is that if you don't manage to complete both actions entirely (some of them being two-part affairs), you're punished by the bank giving every other player 2 bucks (leaving you a bit behind).

 

 

All this freedom can make the game feel a bit chaotic at first, specially with the switching of the special power turn-order chits between players (or, in other words, players stealing them from you when you didn't expect to lose them), but after a few matches you start taking the opponent's moves and desires into consideration when choosing your actions.

 

The structure of the game is rather simple. At the board, one of the seven palaces is being visited by the Maharaja, and that's the place where the scoring will occur (where money will be paid to the players that have built stuff there). It's standard area majority: player with the strongest presence gets the most money. What is interesting in the economics of the game is that a palace costs 12 moneys and only gives you 3 points if it was the first one built there (turn order is thus crucial); otherwise, it's just 1 point, like the houses that cost 1 money. Still, building palaces is what makes you win the game, so you should still do so, even if it's crazy expensive (you start off with 15 bucks, so that you have an idea, and that's pretty close to the most money you can make in a scoring round).

 

 

It's a game that has a strategic quality that I enjoy a lot: you have to learn how to pick your battles. You cannot win every dispute, and you cannot even really fight every dispute: sometimes you just have to go ahead to the are that will (hopefully, since that can be modified too) score next. Even if you can move all around the board, every time you cross a path that you haven't built you give money to the other players, so you have to be careful with your movements.

 

The development of each match is interesting to see. The relative freedom of action allows players to move all over the map, influence a bunch of different places, making the game really feel dynamic and alive. Even players that didn't really enjoy the game, for not liking simultaneous action as a mechanism, or thinking that the strategies are confusing, admitted that this design is mighty clever. Nobody in the group hated it or thought it was a bad game.

 

Matches take anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes, depending on the analysis paralysis of the players in choosing the actions, and also the experience level. This game strongly rewards experience, to the point where a newbie has a very small chance against someone that has played it a couple of times before. Last time I played it I was the the only non-newbie at the table and won by a distance of 2 palaces, which is quite sizeable.

 

 

The production values of the game are astonishing. The game is gorgeous, and the pieces are very functional. Even if the font used to name the palaces on the board is almost unreadable, it hardly matters since we've nicknamed every character on the board (Mad hatter, for the guy in the top-middle part of the board). The glass pieces for the palaces are specially good looking, and the art is very nice. The manual is poorly written, in usual Phalanx fashion, but this being a rather normal eurogame, one can figure out the rules through the ambigui

 

Still, after more than a dozen matches I must say that I'm not as enchanted by the game as I once was. I still quite like it, and have played some exciting matches (I've even won on the second tiebreaker!), but I feel like I've pretty much seen all what the game has to offer. I'm not afraid of suggesting it when there's 4 or 5 people (ages 10 and up, I'd say, even though the publisher says 12+) willing to race non-linearly across a board , but I nowadays I prefer games that have more depth, or at least keep showing new strategic aspects even after a dozen matches. Wolfgang Kramer seems to have recognized this and included a couple of variants at the end of the manual (as he usually does), and while they are interesting and do add some replay value, it's essentially the same game, requiring the same kind of thinking with or without the extra rules. It's a solid area-majority eurogame, one that I enjoy playing and am glad that I own, but it isn't really essential to my collection