Chaturanga Game - Bookshelf Edition

Chaturanga Game - Bookshelf Edition
by Front Porch Classics

List Price: ~~$39.99~~
Category: Toy
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Product Summary

Manufacturer: Front Porch Classics
Brand: Front Porch Classics
Model: FPCO2040

Toys and Games Reviews of Chaturanga Game - Bookshelf Edition

Customer Review: Too lucky
Summary: 2 Stars

The production quality of the game is pretty good. The box is made of wood, with a magnetized door and a hinge. Inside the door is a rules briefing and some thematic / historical text. There is also a board made of a nice fabric, and 4 satin-like pouches for the 4 colors of game pieces. There are also a couple of wooden dice, shaped as rectangles and bearing an icon representing one of the pieces on your team.

There are 4 colored teams - red, green, back, and yellow. Each team gets a 4×2 section in one of the corners of the 8×8 board, situated perpendicular to the ones adjacent to it. Each team is comprised of 4 pawns and 4 battle pieces. The pawns move exactly like the pawns in chess - move forward, capture diagonally forward. The 4 battle pieces are as follows:

1) Raja: This guy is your King. He can move one space in any direction, and if he gets captured you're out of the game.
2) Elephant: This guy is your Rook. He moves orthogonally as many spaces as you like in any direction.
3) Cavalry: This is your Knight. He moves just like a knight in Chess - any direction, in the shape of an L (2 in any orthogonal direction, and then one perpendicular to it).
4) Ship: This guy is like a gimpy Bishop. He moves diagonally, but can only move to the second square in any direction.

To play the game, all 4 factions are set up on the board. In a 2 player game, the red and yellow factions are allied with one another (and the same with the back and green). Turns move clockwise, and you move one faction and then your opponent moves his faction clockwise from that.

Here's where the "lucky" part comes in: you have these two dice with guys on them. Each turn, you get to roll the dice and then move the guys in question. So if you roll a ship and a pawn, you get to move both the ship and the pawn. If you roll 2 Cavalry, you get to move you Cavalry piece twice. If you roll a guy that's already been captured, you get to move a pawn instead. You're never forced to move.

This has a dynamic that's not too bad. It allows you to be daring and move into an endangered position, knowing that your opponent might not roll to be able to take your piece, and also knowing that you might not roll to be able to move out of danger. Your Raja is also not as wimpy as a King in chess - he can't be taken by pawns or Ships. Only another Raja, the Cavalry, or an Elephant may take him out. He's the only such protected piece in the game.

What's killer is double rolls. Rolling a double ship isn't so bad, but rolling double Cavalry can give some surprise flexibility. Rolling double Rajas can be pretty dangerous as well, since he can be pretty brazen and even take another Raja like that. But what's uber-powerful is double Elephants. That roll unbalances the game, and puts the luck level too high. Being able to skate across the board at will and snipe any piece, even a Raja, is just too much for me to bear with any pleasure.

There's also the fact that when one of your factions gets taken out (say your green Raja is killed), the other alliance gets two turns before you get your next turn. This kind of sucked.

In addition, there's this rule that just seemed pointless to me. When one of the Rajas gets killed, all of his other pieces stay on the board and may be taken by the opponents. If his alliance member (say the green one got killed and the black one is still alive) takes a Raja from the other alliance, they can be like "I won't take you if the green guy can get back in the game". The guy who got killed can then choose to accept or deny the request. So it will really never work in your favor, if playing against an even semi-competent opponent. To add insult to injury, if your faction demolishes the opposing faction, then you have an intra-faction war to determine the "winner" of the game. "There can be only one!"

Concluding Thoughts

The game played quickly, and had a nice production quality. There was a fair amount of strategy, but it was effectively hamstrung by the double moves of a single piece. I think moving to an open-faced card hand, instead of rolling dice, would do much to alleviate this problem. You'd still be limited in your moves (like in Battlelore), but it would be a (fairly) perfect information game and your opponent could work against it and at least know what he was up against. This would do MUCH to help the gameplay.

While enjoyable, the luck of the bones made the game too light. It's hard to feel good about winning just because fortune smiled on you and gave you the double-elephant.

I concur! Too lucky!

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Description of Chaturanga Game - Bookshelf Edition

This game will transport you back through the ages, back to the time of the Vedic Rajas of India. Chaturanga is well recognized as the earliest form of chess that's played on an authentic cloth game surface by 2, 3 or 4 players. It combines the basic strategy of chess with the dynamic challenge of chance, as each move is determined by the random roll of wooden dice.

Whether you are playing for treasure or fun, Chaturanga is a great game for the entire family. Comes packaged in an aged wooden book that will look great on the bookcase or in any room of the house. Includes easy-to-understand game instructions.

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