Tabannusi: Builders of Ur

Every new Tascini comes with expectations for me; alongside the terrific Portuguese and the great Alexander, he belongs to my personal trio of favourite euro designers. Tabanussi won me over at first because you can immediately recognise the mind behind it: familiar ingredients, tied together in a way that is far from obvious.

At its core, we do dice drafting and action selection as architects in ancient Ur. We move from district to district, take plots, and construct buildings, while the dice serve more than one purpose. That is its clever point: I never felt the dice became the usual tiresome chore, even though much of the game rests on them.

The interaction, meanwhile, has its own peculiar sense of humour. You can build on other players’ plots—and, in fact, more easily than on your own—while the player whose land you have just stepped onto essentially receives a little pat pat from the gods. Clearly, Ur’s urban planning had different priorities. It is delightfully aggressive as an idea, but it is not the easiest thing to digest for people accustomed to particular, familiar euro patterns.

The theme recedes somewhere along the way, leaving the game design to do the work. That would not be a problem if the whole gave me the complete feeling of Tascini’s other games. I had fun and enjoyed the first play, but on the second the unfinished-prototype impression became stronger—an impression that, apparently, was not mine alone. For me, it is by far the weakest entry in the T series: not uninteresting, nor a bad experience, but something simply does not click all the way. At least, in an era of astronomical prices, it remains reasonably priced.

Updated session

The four-player game materially changed my view. Although I expected only small differences because of the sensible scaling of dice and plots, the game became much more interesting and stronger. I would not place it beside the series’ top titles, but for a regular euro group of four, it is a very good choice.