So we sat down last night not sure what to play. The store owner decided to encourage to try out the new Thurn and Taxis expansion. Why not? The base game is a fun, tension driven game.

Out comes a myriad of new pieces and a new board, and we sort it out while our resident rules lawyer (in a good way) reads the 2 sided sheet.

There's two new parts.

The Audience

Carriages race off to Rome down a slightly random looking map with a few decision points (do I go there quickly or slowly?). Like Royal Turf, you can 'bet' by placing token on each carriage. Each player has a tokens worth 1-5, and there's five carriages... so 1 token in each. Each carriage has a colour. These match the colours of the regions on the main board. If you claim a route but don't place a house on the main board in that colour, you move the carriage instead.

Once you arrive in Rome, the occupants pile out. If there's already a token of the same number there when you arrive, it gets knocked out. So you want your high scoring carriage to arrive last to Rome... but you want it to arrive before the end of the game.

The Officials

Each special ability (Take 2 cards, Play 2 cards, Sweep the board or use the cartwright) has a token. When you use that special, you take the corresponding token. When an ability runs out of tokens you have to trade in between 1 and 4 tokens (all different) for a minor effect (1 card, 1 VP, 1 house played).

We played both together. The Audience board seemed random and a little dull. There was a broad sweep of points from it (from 1 to 8), with little control or tactics used. Not knowing which carriage has which tokens on it, and having to memorise your own set up just made it far too random and uninteresting.

The official however added a interesting set of decisions, with some less optimal choices taken on the board to collect sets of official tokens. The 'sweep' (or el beardy) power was used much more than normal to collect the token when players had less interest in what was up.

Certainly the new tokens got me planning in three different directions enough that I managed to block my own route at one stage and had to start out again.... careless, but a sign that there's a little more to think about. Or I was thinking to hard.

In short:
The Audience : random addition that adds little.
The Official : Interesting addition that adds a second layer of decisions.