Well,
I discovered Taj Mahal only few weeks ago (I had a copy of the game in the shelves since 2005 I think, but I never played it until last month!), and I played three times in the last days… because I really loved the game. It prefer Amun-Re but I have to say that it’s an excellent Knizia game (and it’s faster than Amun-Re)…
I have to disagree with your opinion about the impossible chance to stop the leader.
In my, even small, experience, the leader is not so evident because in the last region a player can score a lot of points because of the connections (the last region is in the middle of the map so it’s really easy to have a lot of connections). But you never know if you are able to win auctions so that you can place your palaces there!
Moreover in my opinion you can stop a person in 2 ways if you have the rights cards of course!
- you can play one card instead of another in order to “block” one character already played by the current leader
- you can build a palace in a position that maybe does not let you score a lot, but avoid the connetions to the opponent

I have to admit that this is not always easy to achive, but it’s possible!

I never played in 5 players where, in the opinion of the guy you explained me the rules and played a lot of games, is more chaotic. He suggests to play in 4 players because even in 3 it’s more due to the luck the possibility to win or not the card contests…

It’s just my thoughts, in my 3games experience :-)
Cheers,
ema

Don’t forget that you pick up the vast majority of the cards you play, and you have wide latitude in deciding what to pick up.  You can also watch the cards opponents are picking up.

Sometimes it’s worth folding at the very start of a turn just because you want to get first crack at the cards.  So you have more latitude for stopping the leader than might be apparent at first.

Yet another good topic Shannon.  I think the topic is one of thinking of games (or more exactly your position in a game) as a closed or open system.  IF you look at you gross gain and not your net gain against each opponent then what you describe will often happen.

This is further compounded by Euros essentially being highly indirect interaction or attacking games. Given enough complexity chaos results and players can not see the effect of their actions.

The basic goal of ANY game is to make the choice that most improves your position compared to the rest of the players.

So the need to stop a leader is only important insofar as it closes the gap between you and he.

The weird case I see is a game like Fossil, where the only player who CAN influence a leader is the player sitting to his immediate right. But again, if you have a move that gives you more points but also gives the leader a lot of points, that is the better choice.

I refuse to read this article until you correctly spell “whose”.

I think perhaps the best way to go after the leader is to try to get in his way, rather than to directly beat on him.  So if you’re going to play a card and you can match the lead in a color of one of two players, choose the leader.  You may not be able to stop him from claiming a category, but you can keep him from getting it cheaply.  Little factors like this can add up and make life tough for the player in front.  Then again, my success rate in TM is pretty dismal, so this suggestion might just be a waste of electrons.

This is an interesting topic. 
I’ve seen it most in Attika when one player is threatening to connect two tmeples.  I’ve only played in a few groups, but the onus is usually on the player to the right of the player threatening to connect.  It is a form of brinksmanship and I personally do not like that aspect in games that count on that mechanism to work.

The question of whose job it is to slow down the leader is an interesting one. If it has to be done, as perhaps it does in games like Shogun or Attika, I think it’s the player in second place. The player to the winning player’s right should not feel blackmailed into having to “block the leader” if he’s in last place and doing so would compromise his ability to get back into it.

Taj Mahal is more subtle, though. Like Modern Art, Taj Mahal is in large part an evaluation game, and so when players make “mistakes” in evaluating what stuff is worth, someone else will benefit. If one player notices something - like, that the commodities can really add up, or that the particular board layout is one that offers easy connection points - that the other players don’t, he’ll win, and that’s OK. I don’t think anyone really needs to “stop him”, in the sense of making a play that is suboptimal for the player in order to deny something to a leader. What I’ve seen from time to time in Taj tends to be for one player to get ahed early by winning a number of early commodity chips. At that point, those chips become very valuable to him or her, but less valuable to anyone else, so it tends to amplify the sense of a runaway leader.

Fortunately, once players understand the commodity chips are valuable (that’s why there are Elephants on almost everything), it’s inordinately hard for one player to score that kind of coup early.

The situation with the Princess is reversed. Once I have the Princess card, winning that chip becomes less valuable to me (because I already have the card, so if I get two Princesses I just lose them for no benefit) while remaining valuable to everyone else. So if you’re holding onto the Princess for half the game at low cost (i.e., not having to spend lots of drafts to snap up every princess bid card as it becomes available, or bid on Princess tokens just to deny them to anyone else), that seems to be just taking advantage of an opportunity the other players let you have, which is OK, or an unlucky card split. The Princess should be the subject of spirited competition all game and hard to keep because you sacrifice cards to continuously play her.

The connections are cool because they reward long-term planning. The board has to be set up to allow you to build them, in the sense that it’s really hard to win multiple auctions in a row. So an auction setup where the auctioned regions jump back and forth across the board is much more amenable to scoring big connection points than a board where regions are auctioned in clumps. Moreso even than all the other points, you really need to pace yourself to get the connection points. Once you’ve got the position set up for a big score, it’s pretty hard for other players to block you without paying an exorbitant price themselves - there is always the King available, and you can drop early with only one win and still score big points.

Of course....jumping back to the title. Most players’ plans involve “someone” slowing down the first player from a large bonus.

I suspect that this duty falls most on the second player...again by looking at costing out action choices.

If a player’s object is to maximize their “Score” (think of “Score” as a combination of points, potential future points, and overall game position) in comparison to opponents: then there must also be some weighting for player ranking.

Gains in Score against players who are behind you are less valuable than gaining against players who are ahead of you.

That means that an identical move which solely nets you Points is less valuable to a player in second place than a player in last. 

That means that it usually easier for the second place player to justify stopping the first place player, but it could easily fall to the last place player if that player can succeed with little or no loss to their Score.

I see Doctor Whose coming back to BBC1 this weekend

Taj Mahal is not about trying to stop anyone. It is about getting in, winning what you want, and getting out ASAP. The better you can do this, the better your chances of winning. Getting into a “dollar auction” with another player is something you need to mitigate. I have found that, with experience, you can learn when it is safe to stay in and when you should withdraw. You learn when to go for certain colors. You learn when to go for connections or go for goods.

This is coming from someone who has played 15 times and won at least 12 of them. Luck? Chaos? Runaway leader? Nope. Skill and experience. This is simply a game where the more skillful player will have a better chance of winning. This isn’t the usual euro where the leader gets bashed down and the guy who was in second place scrapes by with a win.

If you want to use a game to base the “whose job is it” argument, maybe take a look at El Grande. That is the prime example of a game that absolutely requires the other players to sacrifice some of their actions to specifically target the player in the lead.

Dan -

While I agree with you in the main:

This isn’t the usual euro where the leader gets bashed down and the guy who was in second place scrapes by with a win.

I think you may be mistaking European for American games here :) The bash-the-leader thing is certainly more traditional in American games.

If you want to use a game to base the “whose job is it” argument, maybe take a look at El Grande. That is the prime example of a game that absolutely requires the other players to sacrifice some of their actions to specifically target the player in the lead.

As a huge El Grande fan, I take some issue with this. Yes, it is important that given the choice, you take points from the leader. But it’s rarely that obvious; there is some subtlety to who is really ahead and just as in Taj Mahal, you have to pursue primarily your own self-interest. That’s what makes El Grande such a great game in my opinion compared to, say, Shogun.

Both Taj Mahal and El Grande are highly-interactive games of evaluation, and it’s certainly true that in both, mis-evaluations by some players can arbitrarily benefit others. But I don’t think either requires sacrificing self-interest to go after the leader to work. Primarily pursuing self-interest is, as with most well-designed euros, the way to go.

Great article, Shannon.  Our last play of Age of Empires III involved six players.  The final scores were 69, 68, 68, 65, 59 and 55. I ended up in third place (68 but fewer points in the New World in the third age, which is the tie breaker) but was the kingmaker.  I was stuck with a soldier strategy and had to decide who to attack in the final age.  I couldn’t use my soldiers to improve my own score (Red foiled my plan my purchasing Militia), so I had to decide between Yellow and Blue.  I correctly discerned that Blue was in the lead, and killed enough colonists to deny Blue 6 points, plunging him to fourth. As I prepared to do this, Blue was adamant that he wasn’t in the lead. It made for an unpleasant ending, since Age isn’t a wargame. If we had been playing Samurai Swords, where all you can do is attack one another, there wouldn’t have been any hard feelings. But I find AoE3 to be an interesting mix of Euro and Amerigame.

It is important in such situations that, when a player is acting in his/her own self-interest (Ayn Rand would be proud), that self-interest includes the ultimate goal of winning the game, not just maximizing his or her score. 

This is an important distinction, as a player may receive more points in a game for ignoring the leader while decreasing his/her opportunities to catch the leader’s point total by game end.

If a player only tries to maximize his/her score but then expects another player to block the leader, he/she is trying to win through a kingmaking situation.

That last sentence should read “if the second-place player only tries to maximize his/her score....”