The challenge after releasing a hugely successful game like Quacks of Quedlinburg is how to come up with a game title that is even harder to pronounce? But in Taverns of Tiefenthal, I think Wolfgang Warsch nailed it. Players:...

The challenge after releasing a hugely successful game like Quacks of Quedlinburg is how to come up with a game title that is even harder to pronounce? But in Taverns of Tiefenthal, I think Wolfgang Warsch nailed it.

Players: 2-4
Time: 60 mins
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Artist: Dennis Lohausen
Publisher: Schmidt Spiele

The sequel. The second album. Always tough things to get right and board games are no exception. There is excitement, expectations, and expletives if it all goes wrong. Quacks was a light game. Taverns of Tiefenthal ups the complexity, and completely changes the mechanics, but retains a certain flair that players of Quacks might recognise. Let’s talk about running a pub.

You have taken over the local hole in the wall. The sort of place whose age you can measure by cutting a table in half and counting the beer rings. The dog has a spot by the fire. And the clientele are the sort that make half a pint and a pork pie last 3 hours. You simply aren’t going to make your fortune without changing things up. Fortunately the deck of cards from which you draw each night’s guests and workers is sat just waiting to be built. 

As you run your pub each round you’ll generate money and beer. Good beer attracts a range of local bearded hipsters who offer much more lucrative returns. Meanwhile, the cash from guests can be re-invested in various bits of equipment and temporary workers who will boost the efficiency of your tavern on those rounds they appear from your deck. More tables let you fit more people (and keep drawing longer), brewers will let you produce more beer. 

But the deck building is only half the story.

See, the cards you draw at the start of each round are really just creating opportunities for the turn, not guaranteeing anything. To actually generate money or beer you need to activate those cards or sections of the player board by drafting dice of the right value. 1s and 6s drive your brewing. 1s and 2s squeeze money from the tight fisted old codgers blocking up your tables at the start of the game. But 3s and 4s? Apart from the wildly inefficient ‘any value for a coin/beer’ spaces, they start out useless. The new guests you can attract, however, not only offer more money but they let you make use of those previously awful die values.

This draft gets tense, it’s the one time in the round you really care what other people are doing. Trying to work out which dice are likely to get around to you, possibly denying the next player a die they desperately want. It is quite possible in this game for you to get an excellent draw from your deck, and be utterly unable to do anything with it due to a disastrous set of dice rolled by the table. This, more than anything else in this game, is going to be divisive. It’s the same potential disaster that can strike in Quacks, so your ability to shrug off that disappointment and laugh at your misfortune will determine whether such an event will ruin your experience or not. 

But if you are a player more sensitive to fate’s cruelties then you can invest more into mitigation abilities: servers give you private dice that at least increase your chances of rolling a value you need, while dishwashers polish up a die one pip. You’ll never be truly free of chance, but you can give yourself an edge.

Better yet, why deal with the randomness of your deck? Each area of your jigsaw-like pub can be upgraded, flipping that piece of cardboard to give you a permanent employee of that type, or doubling the efficiency the basic action, or increasing your capacity to store cash or beer between turns. These upgrades often require a fair bit of investment, but they can be made cheaper on a turn one of the corresponding workers appears: you lose the card in exchange for a discount as they go from temporary to permanent employees.

Between managing two currencies, only activating a subset of cards, and adding permanent upgrades, you end up with a very unique take on deck building. One with, actually, impressively strong theming. Who knows who is going to turn up for a night out or which occasional workers will come looking for a shift. Meanwhile even a busy pub can not bring in that much if no one is ordering.

It even twists some foundational aspects of the genre. Bought cards, get this, go on top of your deck rather than into your discard pile! Borderline sacrilege. And it does raise some interesting questions even as it answers others. The cards you buy are guaranteed to be useful, even those bought just before the very last round, which is essential for the prescribed number and structure of the rounds in this game. But it also means players who get a good first round, and buy slightly better stuff, get that stuff immediately. I don’t think it matters, the drafted dice are more important and everyone has to run through the same set of shitty starting cards anyway, but I’ve never been able to completely shake that it might.

I have fond memories of the grubby student pubs of my youth, and in many ways the chaos of Taverns brings those to mind. You’ve got a pretty good idea how the night’ll go, but it’s going to throw you a curveball now and again. That may not be your kind of pub, but it has a charm that I can’t help but appreciate.

And the drinks are good value too. The game comes with 5 modules building the game from its simple core up to… well… heights I’ve never reached. The first module adds schnapps and schnapps-fueled dancers who up your options quite delightfully. But as each module builds on the ones before it, you need a steady group to play through them all. I’d love to do that! But my gaming lifestyle doesn’t make it easy. 

Fortunately the simpler core game by itself has proven more than replayable enough. I still want to upgrade the visiting monk early and really fly around the monastry track that, yes, I am only mentioning now. There is some serious potential in focussed strategies around the different upgrade types that need to be seen to be believed. So even if the guest book module will always be a pipe dream for this rough’n’tumble backwater, I know any night with Taverns will pass in a comfortable, hazy blur.

If nothing else I’ve got to raise a glass to Tavern’s originality, its style and its generosity. I hope to get many more nights of fun beneath its dusty eaves. Before some yuppie turns it into a gastropub…

Rating: This One’s On Me

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