First Impression: Roman Taxi

By W. Eric Martin
May 14, 2009

Designers: Stephen McLaughlin, Jeremy Holcomb, Karl Huber & Dan Tibbles
Publisher: Bucephalus Games
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $30
Links:

Version played: Comped production copy
Times played: Three, all with two players

My opponent for all three games of Roman Taxi dismissed the design with a cutting non-review review: “It’s a game.” As in, the contents of the box meet all the qualifications of a game, and someone looking at these contents won’t mistake them for anything other than a game, but that’s as far as he’ll go. “It’s a game” is the verbal equivalent of a bored hand shooing away a non-existent bug, a teenager waving off a parent, a spouse shooing an unwanted partner. “How’d you like that movie?” “It’s a movie.” “What did you think of dinner?” “It was food.” You don’t want to watch it, eat it or – in this case – play it ever again.

Veni, Vidi, Ludo

The theme of Roman Taxi can be deduced from the title: You’re in Rome, and you’re driving a taxi. You must pick up Roman citizens and move them from point A to point B in order to earn money. More accurately, you move them from point A-T to point A-T, with each passenger having a specific starting and ending destination, as well as a fare he will pay and a time he will allow you to make the delivery. Cross that time threshold, and he’ll pay only half the fare initially promised. Take twice as much time as he allows, and he’ll get out and walk, leaving you one sad cabbie.

The gameboard is a crazy quilt of colors, with the purple destination buildings being surrounded by one- and two-lane brick roads that are colored white, yellow, red, blue and green. Each player starts with a passenger, with five more standing on various corners waiting for a ride. On a turn, you draw a travel card from one of three columns of cards and move your taxi to the next space on the road of that color; most travel cards feature only a single color – yellow, blue, red or green – while some offer a double move or a U-turn. (The rules mention white cards in passing in an example, but the game includes no white travel cards. If those cards don’t exist, why have white spaces on the roads at all? Enlarge the colored spaces to remove the unexplained and superfluous game element.)

Each travel column has three cards in it, and whoever takes the final card in a column takes the face-up event card showing above it. The events are mostly positive – score 1-3 points, earn points if you deliver to these destinations, make an extra move, remove a time counter – while a few are not.

So you drive and drive and drive and drive, and eventually the passenger deck runs out. The game ends after the next delivery, and the hack who’s earned the most money wins.

When in Rome, Don’t Do This

Roman Taxi suffers from problems with both the game design and the graphic design. To start with, you will take the same action from turn one onward: Pick a travel card and move. Sure, you’ll draw an event card every so often, but the game has no escalation, no story arc, to steal a term from Jonathan Degann. You always have five passengers waiting somewhere on the board, and aside from the rare double move, you putt-putt along as if you’re pulling the chariot by hand. Leo Colovini’s Cartagena uses a similar “play a card to move” mechanism, but in that game you have multiple pieces to move, multiple moves on a turn, a private stash of cards, a leapfrog aspect that lets you set up big plays, and a hand-refilling mechanism that has everyone second-guessing one another in who’s moving what where. None of those tactical elements exist in Roman Taxi.

More frustrating than the slow pace of play are the passenger cards that present you with a nigh impossible challenge of moving from A to B in the time allowed due to three circumstances:

1. The one-lane roads are all one-way.
2. The two-lane roads require you to travel on the right, which makes it tough to reach some destinations without one of the rare U-turn cards or without making a giant time-consuming loop.
3. The central passageways are clogged with colored bricks, which have you stopping and starting worse than an afternoon drive on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

With two players, you have some idea of which travel cards your opponent might play, which lets you try to set up future moves to some degree, given the small number of movement options available. I can’t imagine playing this game with even three players, much less five, as the travel board would change tremendously from one turn to the next, leaving you floating from card to card and daydreaming in the meantime.

As for the graphic design, the gameboard is a bad imitation of Piet Mondrian crossed with Romper Room. Everything is intensely colored, leaving your eyes nowhere to focus and making it difficult to even make out where the roads are compared with the background landscape that has no purpose in play. Jiggle the board slowly in front of someone with motion sickness, and she’ll be searching for an open window…

The rules don’t explain how to navigate through intersections, with an example contradicting the written explanation: Do I have to stop on the yellow brick on the wrong side of the road when I’m passing through an intersection? What about when I’m turning left onto a street and hit a colored brick matching the travel card? How can I make a U-turn in an intersection, when I can’t make one elsewhere without using a U-turn card? All of these questions are aggravated by colored spaces that look like they might touch a destination, but do not clearly do so.

The taxi tokens are narrow pyramids that are too large for the brick spaces in the road. To let you pinpoint the space on which the taxi stands, one tip of the pyramid is painted black – except on the pyramid that is itself entirely black. Even the score tokens don’t work, being too large for the spaces on the scoring track.

All complaints aside, Roman Taxi is a game. No lie.

Want to try Roman Taxi for yourself? Perhaps not after that less-than-glowing review, but if you do, head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page!

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