Targi
October 1, 2020 | ≈ 665 words | Targi
Thoughts on Targi
Ok so basically like every game i play, i started targi with an initial good impression given to me from reviews of npi and susd; but even after being told that the game is interesting and the expansion is good, after playing the game i feel like there’s not enough to compel me to fully engage with the actions, the turns, the patterns, to win.
euro games tend to feel like this for the most part. you take turns and optimize until the game ends and there’s no emotional response to the game ending. there’s no soul to these games, and by soul i am obviously referring to the all-encompassing feeling that is being invested with each game interaction and falling in love with the systems that it becomes easy to overlook flaws and easier to find reasons the game is great. i did not get that feeling in targi, i got instead a good soulless euro.
the great thing about targi is that if you imagine yourself to be someone who likes abstract strategy games, targi is good to play to pretend to play an abstract strategy game. the bad thing about targi is that it is a bad abstract strategy game. the simple reason that targi doesn’t have the great interaction between players analyzing tens, if not hundreds, of moves in a row and analyzing combinations of moves until the final checkmate: it’s fucking random.
every round ends with a great showing of the new actions for the next round. actions that simply get you resources are replaced at the end of the round with the sole reason you are gathering resources, and those reasons are “tribes” (translation: euro game resource requiring object which give you victory points (translation of victory points: a german creation which somehow convinced strategy-game-playing-humans that getting them is fun)) which are then paid for with resources to give you points, and then being replaced by a resource action for the next round. this is all great stuff and “fun”, but it makes for a pretty shitty combinatorial game, where optimizing your best move while decreasing your opponent’s options gets halted every 3 moves and you are reset to a completely different state.
why is this such a bad thing? why such a focus on targi being a bad combinatorial game? it’s a euro game nobody ever asked if it was a good abstract strategy game. that’s because in the first round of targi, both players know exactly what moves each other player can and cannot make. both of you are completely capable of planning each other’s moves to the completion of the round. both players are completely capable of taking moves that force the other player to lose. and that feeling, the feeling of finding that perfect move, and presenting it to the other player as a puzzle for them to solve, and to then for them to pass it back to you as a gift from one human to another, that has soul. that has feeling, feelings of joy, feelings of frustration, feelings that your game partner just made a fantastic move that forced you to lose, or made a terrible move that you want to fix for them or just to let them know from one person to another as a gift for the next game. that feeling in the from the first round, is repeated round after round after round until the game ends and well…it ends with a whimper after both players realize that the moves from one round cannot be planned for the next, to the next, to the next, to the next.
i blame only myself that i find this flaw. it is an abstract that spits in the face of other abstracts. targi is a great game, it has moments that will cause players to get excited, or feel betrayed; people will absolutely enjoy this game as an abstract strategy game, but they will only be pretending.