Trajan (board game)

Trajan is a board game designed by Stefan Feld and first published in 2011 by the German publisher Ammonit Spieleverlag. Set in ancient Rome, the game casts each player as a Roman senator competing to advance personal status through business and political maneuvering. The game is built around a rondel, a rotating action-selection wheel that borrows its mechanical logic from mancala-style bead distribution: players choose an action by moving beads from one of the rondel's compartments and then execute the actions tied to the compartments the beads pass through, a distinctive resource-and-turn-management system that became one of the signature mechanisms associated with Feld's design work. Play typically runs two to four participants, and the game rewards careful sequencing of moves across several simultaneous tracks covering military conquest, the Senate, the Forum, the Colosseum and building construction. Trajan received strong critical attention on release for the originality of its central mechanism and went on to win the Deutscher Spielepreis in 2012, cementing its reputation as one of the defining strategy board games of the early 2010s German-style board game scene.