Maharaja: Le Jeu des Bâtisseurs de Palais

A rivetting game blending area control and route planning. Lots of choices, and different strategies. Well balanced. Highly engaging. Plan for the best, be prepared for changes for the worst. Scales equally well as 3, 4 or 5 player games. Nicely produced by Phalanx with attractive art and components. After many games, it is still very engaging. Excellent re-playability. Highly recommended! A top drawer!

This is a "10" after one play. Maharaja is just the kind of game I love - an area control game with lots and lots of rule bending options. There is definitely lots going on, but not in an overly complex way, and it all comes together in a very fun way. Our game came down to the second tie breaker for the win. My girlfriend won - good for her! It was very exciting. I traded this, Medina, Wyatt Earp, and Medici vs. Strozzi, for my over-priced copy of Roads and Boats. Maharaja alone is a far better game than Roads and Boats in my book. What a deal! I can't wait to play again.

Wow, it isn't often I give a '10' to a game, but this one richly deserves it. The dovetailing of the various systems is seamless and flawless. Hardly any luck at all, and yet a lot of surprises. The components are top-notch. The only minor quibbles are that it does not have a custom designed insert for the components and the maharaja probably should have been white to differentiate it from the black player piece. Overall I would say this is the top game of 2004 so far. There are a lot of great games this year, but this one is just about perfect.

A somewhat chaotic K&K, but this is the kind of chaos I like. This game has me always sitting on the tip of my seat, anxious to see my cunning plans unfold or fail miserably because of somebody else's action. There may be a runaway leader problem here, but in my experience, the winner has always been the player who deserved the win because of clever play.

A brilliantly agonizing K/K game. Mistakes feel way more torturous than in most games I've played. Yet despite my first three turns of my first game being almost exclusively mistakes, I nearly needed a tie-breaker with first place. (I was second :^) I noticed similar disasters and recoveries, though of far smaller scale, from my opponents; so, this seems to be a very trickily balanced game. This game thrills me every time I play it. Superb!