I’ve been staring at the box for Taverns of Tiefenthal for months, just waiting for the right opportunity to tear the shrink off and dive into the Tavern business. This board game is designed by Wolfgang Warsch and published by North Star Games .
It took much longer than I expected to get this game to the table. Let’s see if it was worth the wait!
What’s Taverns of Tiefenthal all about?
You’ll play as the owner of a tavern that’s located in a town full of other taverns. The goal of the game is to make your tavern the most successful by attracting the right customers and making the right improvements using dice placement and deck building mechanisms.
Setup
Each player will begin the game with a slim deck of cards that includes 7 guests, a brewer, server, and a table. For the base game you’ll set the monastery board with the summer side up. Each player takes a tavern board. The tavern board is assembled like a puzzle, and pieces can be upgraded by flipping them over as you play. Each player also receives a coaster with 4 white dice placed on top.
Gameplay
Players will compete over 8 rounds. Each round has 7 phases (identified in the rulebook as A-G).
Here’s a quick overview for the different phases in each round. With the exception of phases D and F, you’ll complete the phases simultaneously!
A. New Evening: Advance the moon on the turn tracker and take the benefits.
B. Guests Arrive: Draw cards from your deck and place them in their corresponding locations in your tavern. You’ll do this until no empty tables are left.
C. Here Comes the Server: Take (and roll) a dice of your corresponding player color for each server you have in your tavern.
D. Can I Take Your Order: Roll all 4 white dice and place them on your coaster. You’ll pick one, and then pass the coaster to the person to your left. You’ll continue to draft dice like this until they’ve all been claimed!
E. Plan Your Actions: Take all dice you’ve gained in phases C and D and place them on the action spaces in your tavern you’d like to activate during this round.
F. Serve the Guests!: Perform the actions that you planned in phase E.
G. Closing Time: Pickup all the cards you’ve placed in your tavern this round and put them into your discard pile.
Serve the Guests
The bulk of Taverns of Tiefenthal takes place during the Serve the Guest phase. This is when you’ll activate specific locations in your tavern in order to gain resources. Those resources are beer and Thaler (coins).
You can use beer to purchase new guests and nobles cards to add to your your deck.
Thaler can be used to upgrade equipment in your tavern. You can also use Thaler to buy extra worker cards that you can add to your deck.
There is a safe and storage room in your tavern that will allow you to store up to 2 (and up to 5 if you’ve upgrade these areas) coins and beers.
The importance of cards and how to win!
Victory points are what you’ll need to win a game of Taverns of Tiefenthal. The only place you’ll find victory points is in the upper left corner of the cards. This makes it incredibly important to add those high-value cards into your deck!
The Nobles
I don’t think it would be fair to talk about Taverns of Tiefenthal without mentioning the Noble cards. Each one is worth 10 points which makes them extremely powerful. In a game where the victory points on the cards is the only way to win, gaining these nobles is your key to success.
Fortunately, there’s more than one way to earn these valuable Noble cards. You can attempt to become the best brewer, and every 8 beers you brew will get you a noble. You can also build an engine that produces a lot of Thaler (coins). This will allow you to purchase upgrades for different areas in your tavern. Every upgraded area gets you a noble!
There is a drawback to adding those lucrative Nobles to your deck. They make lousy guests. The regular guests are worth fewer victory points, but they can provide you with valuable goodies and more Thaler than a Noble can.
Overall, I think the Nobles keep things interesting, and depending on the dice you’re getting, it adds to the replayablilty of the game. You’re unlikely to win the game the same way every time.
*There’s a discount on
What do we think about Taverns of Tiefenthal
After reading so many varied reviews for Taverns of Tiefenthal, I wasn’t sure if we’d like the game. It was after a conversation comparing a few Uwe Rosenburg games that it stuck me how much I appreciated a game like Taverns. Sometimes you want to play a heavy euro, and sometimes you don’t. Taverns of Tiefenthal offers a somewhat relaxing, lightweight experience that also includes some interesting strategy and fun mechanisms. We also just really enjoyed the theme.
Upsides:
- The deck management is fun. I like that you get to add your new cards to the top of your deck rather than placing them into your discard pile where you’ll have to wait to play them. This creates some fun strategy as you’ll know what’s coming, and you can layer multiple cards to prepare for the next round.
- Any game with dice involves an element of luck. For each dishwasher you can add to your tavern, you’ll be able to add +1 to a die of your choice. The minor downside: The plus one does not wrap around (6 can’t become a 1) and there is no way to subtract 1 from a die.
- You can only add cards to your tavern during the Guests Arrive stage until the last table is filled. It’s so annoying when you have 3 tables and the first 3 cards you draw are guests. Luckily, there is a special counter guest token that you’ll receive at the start of the first, fourth, and sixth rounds that will allow you to redraw the hand. Also, you’ll either want to upgrade your table area (and gain a noble card!), add more tables to your deck, or both in order to mitigate this risk!
- You’ll roll dice every round. I’m always trying to roll the dice onto the coaster they sit on top of, but they always fly everywhere. How fun would it be if every player had a mini dice tower with a coaster at the bottom to corral the dice! Ok, not an upside, but a fun idea for a potential board game upgrade!
Downsides:
- The puzzle-style tavern boards can be a bit fiddly. These would have been awesome if they were double layered instead. I’m sure cost was a limiting factor here, but it would be really nice to have them.
- One of the biggest issues I have with this game is the complete lack of physical resources to represent Thaler coins and beer. You’re forced to do the math (it’s not that complicated) in your head during the serving phase. The upside: no physical resources makes the game less fiddly!
- A reference card for players would be really nice!
- There’s not a lot of options to refine your deck as the game progresses. It would be nice to have more ways to remove the starting guests cards from your deck.
