The Princes of Florence

Complexity Medium Cost £30 Players 3-5 Producer Rio Grande Games (alea) Size Medium

Premise

The strategy game of patrons, artists and scholars

Review

This excellent game from the makers of Taj Mahal is another fine example of why the German games designers rule nowadays. The game is unusual yet accessible and manages yet again to come up with some novel concepts.

The game is visually very pretty, although not quite as attractive as some of the other German games. The concept is that you are playing a family in Florence during the Renaissance, and that you are trying to out do the other families in terms of your prestige for your patronage of the new thinkers of the age.

You start with money, a board representing your principality, and three profession cards which represent artisans. At the begining of the game you select three from four, giving you a chance to offset the randomness of the set-up. Each of these artisans needs different environments to produce their great works. For example, the Poet needs a Theatre, a Lake and the freedom to Travel to produce his best work.

You build on and landscape your principlality by placing differing shaped tiles into the grid on your board. The buildings and terrains needed the most also tend to be the largest. The three types of buildings range from 7 to 5 to 3 squares; the terrain from 5 to 4 to 3 squares. Initially, the placement is more complex because you cannot place buildings adjacent which turns the placement process into a complex game of Tetris.

The game itself is played over seven rounds. Each round is split into an auction phase, and an action phase. During the auction phase, the starting player (which rotates by round) selects an item to be auctioned, the highest bidder gets the item. The winning player does not take place in subsequent auctions in this round, and that item cannot be chosen again until next rounds. The last player gets to chose anything left for a fixed price. The items which can be bought this way are the landscape tiles (forests, lakes and parks), jesters (which make your artisans happier), builders (who reduce the cost of building and allow you to place buildings adjacent), Prestige cards (for vital bonuses at the end of the game) and Recruiting cards (which allow you to steal artisans from other players). Notably, whenever you draw a card, you take the top five and choose - placing the unwanted ones in any order at the bottom of the stock.

After the auction phase, each player can execute two actions. He can introduce a freedom to make his artisans happier, he can buy a bonus card to gain additional points when creating great works, he can recruit new artisans, or he can add buildings to his board. He can also complete great works to gain money and/or points.

Completing a great work is the point of the game in essence, and it is vital to plan these carefully as the minimum value for a work increases by round. In round 1 it must be worth seven points, whereas in the last round it must be worth seventeen points. Creating a great work is as simple as playing an artisan card from your hand, together with any suitable bonus cards. If you have the artisan's building, this is worth four points, his favourite landscape - another three, his preferred freedom - three points. Jesters will give you two points each - they make all artisans happier and more productive. Bonus cards vary.

At this point you get cash equal to the value of the work, although you can trade these in at this point for prestige points. If at the end of the round you have the greatest value, you get three bonus prestige points.

At the end of the game, players claim any bonus prestige points from Prestige cards, and the player with the greatest number of prestige points wins, money deciding ties.

The game seems to work quite well, but its initial complexity means that you would need to dry run it before playing in earnest. There seem to be many pitfalls for the beginner, many of which are obvious once you've played a few rounds. Its easy to miss prestige points occassionally, as although they are all listed on the boards, there are no reminders elsewhere. Nevertheless, there seem to be no serious defects with the game. I suspect that larger numbers of players will get a better game. One minor niggle is that the cursive foint used can be a bit hard on the eyes and that the colours of the boards are not immediately obvious (the colour coding is a bit too subtle). On the plus side, the setup can be rearranged to occupy strange spaces - ideal if you have a thin long table for example.

Rating

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