I first heard about Rajas of the Ganges a while ago, although i still was surprised to learn it is almost 3 years old now. It looked like a common points heavy euro game, so i didn’t even bother to watch a review i think (or i watched and didn’t think much of it). I also heard a few times how neat is its scoring mechanism, where you either go hard on points or money and have to meet another track to win and so on. This didn’t sound interesting on paper either. But when it came out on Yucata i decided to give it a try and solidify my assumption, that i won’t like this euro. This long intro is just to show you how assumptions can be wrong. And boy, i was wrong 🙂 I liked this game on my first try, where i did horribly and lost by a mile behind my opponent. Next time i played with the same player and shoot ahead quickly, but eventually lost at the end running out of steam. My third game with the same opponent and i finally won by doing a balanced strategy. And that feeling when you get closer and closer on both tracks to meet in the end, it is so satisfying. You build something, you get a few points and a bunch of coins and you move both markers closer to each other, you cross the bonus spot and move a bit further again and so on. I haven’t yet explored all the options and strategies even. I don’t do much in the market and on the river and am still able to play strong with mostly building tiles, but i had one game where i got tons of money from the market, so it seems fairly balanced. Manipulating dice is also fun and getting more and more of them is very satisfying. But you have to sense when it is time to sacrifice a few of them to build that juicy city tile and get points. This game managed to beat Oracle of Delphi for me. Maybe because it is still fresh and i have already played Oracle a ton. And it shows that i might like a clever euro a lot. Strong 9/10.