Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers Review

boardgamequest.com:

My wife and I were heading down to visit my quietly brilliant 16-year-old niece, so I suggested we play a game. I needed something portable and easy to teach, but also a little more advanced than a typical gateway game because my niece could beat adults at Ticket to Ride when she was eight.

I settled on a roll-and-write from venerable Euro designers Inka and Markus Brand, Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers. Dice Charmers is based on the Brand’s very good Euro called Rajas of the Ganges, and captures the feel pretty well. Neither my wife nor my niece had played the original, but they were able to get up and running without much trouble and we had a great afternoon rolling dice and marking up our scorepads together.

Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers is a roll-and-write designed for 2-5 players, takes about 30 minutes to play at low player counts and up to an hour with a full 5, and seems most fun at 2 or 3.

Play is quite simple. Players alternate being the first player who rolls 4 sets of 2 dice, each pair with symbols representing different activities that have been ported over from the Rajas the Ganges world. The first player chooses one die and her choice means the matching die of the same type is temporarily removed from the game and placed on a cardboard elephant, leaving the other six dice for the other players.

The first player gets the benefit of the die she chose, marks it on her score pad, and then the other players choose a die and mark the benefits they get on their pads. The first player marker (indicated by that same elephant) are then passed to the next player.

The dice let you acquire goods, sell goods, get money, get fame, get karma, use the special ability of one of the six Rajas characters who