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shannon_aToday was my last gaming day of the year, and thus most likely my last chance to play a Martin Wallace game in 2008. I brought Princes of the Renaissance with me to EndGame, and Eric, Alex, and Dave were kind enough to indulge me.
Princes of the Renaissance is a pretty straight auction game. You can purchase city tiles with variable VP values and event tiles with set VP values. At the end, you want to have the most VPs.
It's got two interesting elements to it.
The first, and the thing that's the rarest in auction games, is that you can explicitly modify the value of the city tiles after you buy them. You do this by setting off wars which pit one city against another. If your city wins, it'll increase its status, which likely makes its tiles worth more VPs at the end of the game, conversely if it loses, the potential VPs decrease as well.
Thus, there's this whole subgame where you think about building up your military forces, to have a better chance of helping your own cities out.
The second interesting element is that there are two currencies: influence and gold*. You can gain tiles which give you each of these, over the course of the game. However one of the most intriguing elements is that there's a way to convert intrigue-to-gold. That's through the aforementioned city battles. You earn the right to be the condotierre for a city (and fight for it) using intrigue and they pay you gold to do so.
I quite like the idea of having to manage two different currencies, and having a way to change up between them.
Overall, a fun game.
Because of its heavy emphasis on auctions, Princes of the Renaissance feels a bit unusual for Wallace. I think of it more as a super-Ra or Amun-Re than in the same category as his more warlike games--even though there are battles at the center of the game.
However it has at least one very traditional Wallace element: fighting wars for entities that you don't actually control. Here, they're the cities of Italy. We see the same thing in Pericles where you're fighting for the cities of Greece. I also find After the Flood somewhat similar, since you're warring with an empire that you're soon going to lose, ditto Byzantium, where you're helping advance both the Arabs and Byzantines.
I expect I'll write some brief notes later this week on what I played and what I didn't Then I need to get some articles on my schedule for BGN to talk about Martin Wallace and his game designs.
I love games with multiple currencies. I always describe Reiner Knizia's Beowulf as a six-currency auction game, and I'm thrilled that his Money is coming back into print too, thanks to Fred Distribution.
Princes of the Renaissance is a pretty straight auction game. You can purchase city tiles with variable VP values and event tiles with set VP values. At the end, you want to have the most VPs.
It's got two interesting elements to it.
The first, and the thing that's the rarest in auction games, is that you can explicitly modify the value of the city tiles after you buy them. You do this by setting off wars which pit one city against another. If your city wins, it'll increase its status, which likely makes its tiles worth more VPs at the end of the game, conversely if it loses, the potential VPs decrease as well.
Thus, there's this whole subgame where you think about building up your military forces, to have a better chance of helping your own cities out.
The second interesting element is that there are two currencies: influence and gold*. You can gain tiles which give you each of these, over the course of the game. However one of the most intriguing elements is that there's a way to convert intrigue-to-gold. That's through the aforementioned city battles. You earn the right to be the condotierre for a city (and fight for it) using intrigue and they pay you gold to do so.
I quite like the idea of having to manage two different currencies, and having a way to change up between them.
Overall, a fun game.
Because of its heavy emphasis on auctions, Princes of the Renaissance feels a bit unusual for Wallace. I think of it more as a super-Ra or Amun-Re than in the same category as his more warlike games--even though there are battles at the center of the game.
However it has at least one very traditional Wallace element: fighting wars for entities that you don't actually control. Here, they're the cities of Italy. We see the same thing in Pericles where you're fighting for the cities of Greece. I also find After the Flood somewhat similar, since you're warring with an empire that you're soon going to lose, ditto Byzantium, where you're helping advance both the Arabs and Byzantines.
I expect I'll write some brief notes later this week on what I played and what I didn't Then I need to get some articles on my schedule for BGN to talk about Martin Wallace and his game designs.
I love games with multiple currencies. I always describe Reiner Knizia's Beowulf as a six-currency auction game, and I'm thrilled that his Money is coming back into print too, thanks to Fred Distribution.