Tacta, as the name implies, is a card game of tactical strategy. It accommodates 2-8 players and requires a fair bit of table space as the cards constitute the game board and can grow to huge proportions. The aim of the game is to have as many dots showing on your cards as possible at games end. The difficult thing about that is that every other player has the ability to stack their cards on top of your cards and steal your points where they can. The artwork on the cards are vibrant lines and shapes which can accommodate any other card with matching shapes where the orientation and game state allows. The game becomes a tighter, more strategic puzzle as the growing game board encroaches on the edges of your chosen playing space.
I love Tacta. It is an amazingly fun game that, at its heart, is a very simple concept. It’s a highly interactive experience with elements of Take That mechanics, area control and tile placement. It is a lot like classic dominoes, only that it’s not. It’s a lot more math-y, without any real math. I think maybe it just feels math-y. I feel clever whenever I get on a hot streak of perfect positioning or squeeze another player out of a fruitful position or claim their dots.
It looks amazing on the table; the black cards with the various coloured neon print, the backlit geometric lines and shapes.
Though it doesn’t have an official solo mode, it does plays as a thinky yet relaxing solitaire puzzle, where you choose two colours and play one against the other. There are various unofficial solo variants online that I have yet to attempt but from reading through the rules online I’m certain will play as well as the standard multiplayer mode. Having said that though, Tacta definitely shines with more players. It really becomes a battle of wits, trying to outsmart your opponents by creating tight positioning so that they cannot overlay a particularly valuable card of yours, though this also plays against you as the cards you’re able to lay begin to diminish the tighter your play area becomes. To get the most out of a game, you cannot just concentrate on your own corner, you must interact with the choices of the other players and steal or squander as many of their points as you can. This constant shifting of the game state ensures that no two games are ever the same and, for me, is one of it’s greatest appeals.
Some cool features about the cards that I really enjoyed is that each card has a mirror image of itself on its back side. This is incredibly useful when you have the right shapes for a space but not the right orientation. Flip the card and voila! As the cards are mirrored, your personal draw deck is always face up. Each turn you’re able to choose either the topmost card or the bottom card. This is a really nice touch and adds some real agency to your turns and allows you to make meaningful decisions regarding your ever evolving strategy.
I mentioned before that Tacta is kinda like dominoes. It is to a point. The cards do have dots on them but you’re not trying to match dots, you’re concerned only with the various shapes on the cards and how they relate to each other. You can orient the cards in whichever position works and the angles on the table can get pretty wild and chaotic. This gives an illusion that the options you have to lay the cards in this game are limitless, even though there are definitely limits. Sometimes it's fun just to see where the game state ends up at the end of a game. It feels almost like some sort of algorithm made up of minute, tactical choices.
There’s not much in terms of theme that can be said about this game, no grand story arc or characters to get involved with or villains to fight, kingdoms to conquer. The story is told through the game play itself; the interactions with your opponents, bad choices, clever choices, as it is with all great abstract games.
When I first bought Tacta, my brother mentioned to me that if he'd of seen this game on the shelf somewhere he never would’ve picked it up. Something about the art and it’s abstract nature didn’t appeal to him. By the time we played through our first game he was eagerly requesting to play another. It has that effect on you.
Overall score: 90/100
- Artwork: 5
- Complexity: 2
- Replayability: 5
- Player interaction: 5
- Component quality: 5
You might like:
- Simple yet challenging.
- Easy to teach and play.
- Fun up to high player counts.
- Double sided, mirrored cards.
- Highly interactive.
You may dislike:
- Don’t like abstract games.
- Take that mechanism.
- More tactical than strategic.
- No fancy art.
- Can take up a lot of table space
