TA-KE (2017)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
2	30 mins	Arve D. Fühler	Huch!

In this chip taking game, players are trying to select the right people and appoint them to their court.

This is done by taking chips from the Audience Hall and placing them in your Inner Courtyard to activate abilities and scoring.

Each of the five characters have their own ability and it’s the timing of these that makes the game nice and thinky.

The Samurai is used to boost your score as a wild.

The Daimyo is used to move Samurai around.

Ronin work to relocate the ghost token (a stack blocker to limit players choices).

The Geisha can move a character in the Audience Hall.

And finally, the Ninja messes with the other players courtyard.

TA-KE is one of those strategic games where each turn, you’re not just thinking about your move, but how it will affect and perhaps open things up for your opponent.

Sometimes a move looks obvious, but then it can reveal characters that’ll give the other player a big boost in score, especially towards the end game.

Because of how the scoring works, each character placed increases its positions multiplier. So each turn, the increases grow.

It is perhaps a game that needs to be played a little regularly, as just a few months can see us stuck in the manual again trying to remember character abilities, and how the turn works.

And although this is a small point, I feel like the score track could have been done better. In an effort to make it fit in with the theme (a garden path on either side of the Court building), it’s spaces are smaller than the tokens, and its max is less than our average finishing score.

Overall, TA-KE is a great 2-player only game, with pretty good components, a clever scoring mechanism, and interesting gameplay.