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That point arrives today, with TA-KE now being 4.5 years old since its 2017 release from German publisher HUCH! — and yet brand new thanks to its debut on the U.S. market from Rio Grande Games. I had played the game five times in early 2018 on a review copy from HUCH!, but I kept feeling that I needed more plays to get a better handle on it, and suddenly it was mid-2018 and newer releases swamped the old. Thanks to the RGG news, I've now played TA-KE twice more as a refresher, and I still enjoy the game as much now as I did then, so let's talk about this new/old release.
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Despite the thematic trappings, TA-KE is an abstract strategy game of perfect information, and gameplay is straightforward: On a turn, take the top chip from an available stack and add it to your board, then each player scores the color of token revealed by your choice. In the image above, the active player can take purple or orange — that is, the top chips not covered by ghost tokens — but whichever one he takes, he'll reveal a silver samurai, and with two silver being visible in the central row, each silver is scored twice, so I earn 2 points for my lone silver, while he gets 4.
After you take a chip, you cover that stack with a ghost token, which in this case means that my choice will be orange, which will reveal a third silver, which means I'll score another 3 points while he gets 6.
That's all straightforward so far. The twists come from the special powers inherent in the four non-samurai chips:
• Daimyo (orange) can move up to three samurai tokens on your half of the player board to different columns. Samurai are wild, so they score 1 point for whatever color matches their current column, in addition to scoring 1 point when silver is revealed.
• Ronin (blue) mess with the ghost tokens, whether adding one from the reserve to a stack, returning one from a stack to the reserve, or moving a token from one stack to another. This action affects which choices are available to you and the opponent, in addition to messing with the tempo of a round. You might have three available choices on your turn, which means I'll have two on mine — but then you use a ronin to add a ghost token and now I have only one choice, which will undoubtedly benefit you more than me.
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• Geisha (purple) move a chip from the top of an available stack to the top of another available stack. If you have lots of blue, then perhaps you can move a chip to cover blue on stack A, while letting you pick up something on stack B that reveals a blue. Someone will pick up that chip from stack A later, thereby revealing and scoring blue again. Geisha shenanigans let you double up on scorings or grab a color that otherwise wouldn't be available.
• Ninja (black) let you use an opponent's daimyo, ronin, or geisha.
When you use the special power of a chip, you slide it up the column on your side of the board from the bottom slot to the middle one, which lowers that value of that chip for the remainder of the game. Ideally you're more than making up that 1-point loss with the action taken, and when you use a ninja, you're spending 1 point to deny the opponent both a point and the use of that power themselves. This double hit accounts for why ninja are worth 1 or 0 points, whereas daimyo, ronin, and geisha are worth 2 or 1 points.
And...that's just about it for the rules. When each stack has a ghost token on it, remove all of the ghost tokens, making all of the stacks available once again. When the final chip is taken from a stack, you reveal the colored space on the game board, scoring for that color like normal — and if that space stays open, that is, someone doesn't use a geisha power to cover it, then that color will score at least twice each time it scores for the remainder of the game.
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All the information is open, so your choices are clear...and sometimes your actual choice for the turn is clear, too, but often you're torn in different directions since each chip choice does three things: gives you a color to score later, gives you a power to use (if you didn't take a samurai), and scores a color for both of you now. Ideally all three of those things will be useful, but future scoring is sometimes iffy because not all colors will score equally. Powers are good, but you rarely know whether you're using a power for maximum impact since, well, you have no idea what that would be.
The value of each color changes from turn to turn, and once players have powers in reserve, it's hard to anticipate in more than a general way what will score when. In the image above, you can see that black has the least potential because it has only two tokens in the stacks, so without the use of powers, it will score only three more times, with the third time being when the colored space on the game board is revealed. Orange, on the other hand, has five tokens remaining, with one in each stack, so it seems like the ideal color to "invest" in as its strength is both deep and wide — yet how are you going to finagle things so that those orange end up on your side of the board?
TA-KE is generally a game of incremental advantage. Sometimes you can have a color on top of three stacks and score a ton of points, but that's rare. You're trying to squeeze out small advantages repeatedly and pivot ahead of the opponent into whatever is coming next — getting in on the ground floor of a stock, as it were.
In the video below, I give more examples of gameplay, discuss the tragic scoretrack (which is my only source of frustration with this game), and ponder the game's setting, which seems arbitrary and a good example of how a culture gets boiled down to a few elements that are repeated over and over again in one design after another.
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