Rajas of the Ganges

  

Rajas of the Ganges is a 2017 game from Inka and Markus Brand, who made the Exit series. It was nominated for and won several awards. It was well received by gamers. I wasn't very interested to try it when it was hot, because it sounded like just another worker placement game, with dice. It was suggested at a recent game retreat, so I joined the game. It turned out to be much more enjoyable than I expected. 

This is a worker placement game, and the dice are a resource you often need to spend when placing workers. They come in different colours and they have different values. Some worker placement spots on the board require specific die colours or die values. Your dice are an important resource to manage. There are ways to gain dice, and you want to maintain a healthy number on hand so that you have more flexibility. You need to strike a balance between using dice to get various resources, and replenishing your dice. 

The main gameboard has many worker placement spots, and the score tracks. There are two score tracks, one to keep track of your money, and the other your fame. They go in opposite directions. Zero is at the bottom right. Money increases in an anti-clockwise manner, while fame increases in a clockwise manner. To win the game, you need to increase both your money and your fame so that your two markers meet each other. When I saw this I said hey that's Ark Nova! But Rajas of the Ganges was published earlier, so it had this mechanism first. It is clever. You can choose which aspect you want to focus more on. Actually there is a 2006 game called Gift Trap which has a very similar concept.

Those square tiles below the gameboard are terrain tiles you can place on your player board, which represents developing your own province. One action in the game lets you pick a tile to add to your province. 

When adding tiles to your province, the roads along the edges of the tiles must line up properly. When you are able to connect icons along the edges of your board to your capital (at the top), you gain bonuses, e.g. dice, money, or fame. Certain buildings in your province also help you gain fame or money. 

There is a river on the gameboard, and you can advance your ship along the river. Your ship only moves in one direction. When it stops, you gain the benefit of the space it is on. Ships block one another, and force other passing ships to leapfrog ahead. If you want to move fast, you can choose to leapfrog the others. By doing this, you will skip spaces and miss their benefits, but further down the river the benefits get better. So it is not necessarily a bad thing. 

I enjoy playing the game, but I struggle to articulate why. I think I overestimate how important innovation is in games. Rajas of the Ganges does not offer anything particularly new to me. No surprise, since this is a game from almost 10 years ago. I tell myself I shouldn't be enjoying it so much. I'm always looking for new ideas in games. They excite me. Rajas of the Ganges does not give me anything unusual, but it does give me a well put together package of mechanisms and play experiences. You need to pursue money and fame, and you compete to do so efficiently. There is some engine building to help you score fame and money more quickly by utilising buildings and strengths you have accumulated. There is a constant need to stay flexible. You want a healthy number of dice in hand, so that you have more options. You want to have some karma in hand too. Karma is something you can spend to flip a die to the opposite side. If you run out, you suddenly lose this flexibility. The game is tactical. You must stay alert for opportunities, for example new tiles that get revealed, or river spaces which your opponents vacate, or die values that you roll. There are opportunities for clever combos. Sometimes by performing one action, it gives you something which in turn triggers gaining something else, which then triggers yet another thing. These are satisfying. 

Turn order is important. I certainly felt the need to fight for it. The game gives you some mid term goals. When you reach a certain money, fame or river level, you get to unlock additional workers. Every worker means being able to do more in a round. Unlocking them is something you must deliberately plan for. 

One type of difficult decision I have to make is grabbing a windfall at the cost of losing flexibility for the next few turns. There is something very tempting on the board I can do, but if I do that, I will for example spend almost all my dice. I can get something now, but I know for the next few turns I have to painstakingly gather some new dice. Sometimes I go ahead and grab that windfall. Sometimes I pass. The beauty is I don't have an easy answer for situations like this. These are the juicy and difficult decisions you have to make in Rajas of the Ganges.

A big thank you to J&J! Jon (right) for recommending the game and Julian (left) for teaching the game. Julian completely destroyed us. He was highly intentional in building up fame, and he managed many powerful combos. He also advanced his ship far ahead of us. I had a lot of fun with this game. It's a joy to discover some good older games.