OUR REVIEW

A RENAISSANCE PRINCIPALITY

Principato

Develop it and earn Prestige

This time our game journey takes into Italy at the time of Renaissance. Aim of the game is to develop and expand your principality to enhance your prestige. Just as any principality in Italy this one too, comprises a church, a palazzo, a city center, a city wall and city environs.

In each of those areas you attend to different tasks. The City Walls harbor your military forces represented by militia, catapults and condottiere. In the city environs agriculture is flourishing. Works of Art like monuments, books and paintings can be found at the Palace. Favors can be gleaned in church and in the city center you do not only find palazzi, but also banking houses. In accordance with these locations you place tokens of the same color and also wooden cubes of the color corresponding to the location.

There is no limit for the number of tokens allowed in an area; should an area be full you place them elsewhere around your principality. But there is a limit for the cubes that can be placed on tiles: Two on Farm and Bank, Three on Church, one on Militia and Condottiere.  

Each player is given a principality. Depending on the number of players a different number of action cards is in play: In case of two players you remove the cards marked with a Three or Four in their corners, and in a game of three players you remove the cards marked with a Four; only in a game of four players all cards are used. The action cards in play and the military cards are separated by back side and shuffled. Starting cards are cards marked with S1 and S2; each player is dealt one of these cards of both S1 and S2 cards, which are placed face-up next to the principality.

The game covers a period of three years. For each of those years a separate stack of cards is used. The stacks for the second and third year are supplemented by shuffling in an additional Military Scoring Card. So, all in all, three military scorings happen in a game. As soon as such a military card is turned up it is implemented.

From the first stack of cards a number of cards depending on the number of players is laid out, five cards in case of two players, six cards in case of three players and seven cards are laid out when four players are in the game. The cards are displayed in the middle of the table, and the draw pile is set next to them at the end of the line.

The goal cards are stacked in two piles according to their back side and each player receives one card from each pile. These cards are kept secret and determine the strategy one should during the game in order to win. Then, each player is given one field, one farm, one palazzo and one bank token to set up your principality.

You play in turns and in clockwise direction, three years all in all. At the end of a year a military scoring happens and then the next year is started. The end of the third year is also the end of the game. Each player in his turn has two actions at this disposal. Those actions are possible in any combination and it is also possible to pass on one or both of those actions. But this will happen very rarely if at all, because those actions are scarce in the game and you usually want to do more in your move than two.

You can choose between three kinds of actions: You can activate an action card, exchange an action card or take a favor cube. In your turn you always have two action cards at your disposal which give you certain actions to implement. At the start of the game those two cards are the two starting cards you have been dealt. 

An action card is activated simply by implementing the corresponding action of the card. You can execute this action only once. After you execute an action you must swap cards, on which an exchange symbol is depicted, swap with a card from the display, regardless of if you want to swap it or not. This rule ensures that no card can be blocked by a player and gives other players the opportunity to execute this action, too.

But at the same time there are cards offering actions that can be blocked by players, obviously cards without an exchange symbol. Those cards need not be exchanged, but can be exchanged if you decide to use the second possible action, “exchange of cards”. This way of swapping cards looses you an action contrary to the forced exchange when using an exchange card. This in an indirect way gives you three possible actions, if not even four of them, when you activate two exchange cards. This gets you necessary action cards much faster and you can implement them much quicker, which is an advantage, because, as already mentioned, actions are a scarce commodity in the game.  

The third possible action, which you could use, is taking a favor cube from stock and placing it into the church of your principality. Favor cubes can be used as a joker in lieu of money cubes or food cubes, and so favor cubes enable you to pay your military forces and to feed them, too.

The turn of a player ends after implementation of both actions. A final act before the turn of the next player starts is to remove the foremost card in the display from the game, move the remaining cards forward by one position and place a new card from the draw pile into the free slot in last place in the display. This ensures changes variety in the game.

When the draw pile of a year has been used up the year ends and a military scoring happens. For this military scoring you first have to feed your militia; this is done by placing green food cubes on the militia tokens. Then you must pay your condottiere by placing yellow money cubes on the corresponding tiles. After feeding your militia and paying your condottiere you determine your current military strength. Each catapult that you own is worth one point. Each condottiere that you could pay - he can be identified by the yellow cube on the corresponding token - earns you an additional point. The same mechanism is used for militia that you were able to feed. Should there be militia or condottiere tokens in your   principality that are not fed or paid, that is, are without a food or money cube, you are penalized with one loss of one point for each such token. Therefore you should keep a careful eye on your military forces and make sure that you can feed and pay them if you want to win the military scoring. When all players have determined the total strength of their military forces military victory point bills are given out in relation to your strength, they serve as victory points. The amount of victory points for each strength value is determined by the number of players in the game. The rules feature a table for this purpose, where you can check the number of military victory point bills due to each player.

In case of a tie both players involved in the tie add their victory points and then divide them by two and if necessary, round up the result.

After military victory point bills have been distributed among players, the green and yellow cubes are removed from the respective tokens and put back into general stock. Then all players are allowed to discard any number of Condottiere and militia back and place them back into general stock. You are free to keep them all or discard them all; the decision is entirely yours, but keep in mind that the next militia scoring could happen sooner than you think and that then maybe you might not be able to feed or pay your military forces. Why? Because there is an additional military scoring at a random time during the second and third year, the necessary cards to make this happen have been shuffled into the stack of cards for the years.

At the end of the third year you calculate your victory points. For the total of your victory points you add up the military victory point bills you own that you have won in the military scorings. Then you add to this the number of victory points marked on each culture token that you were able to acquire, those include books, monuments and paintings which you collected. And finally, you check if you were able to comply with one or both of your secret goal cards. If that should be the case you receive the number of victory points stated on the goal card. And the winner of the game is - well, no surprise there - the player with the highest total of victory points.

As you can see, Principato is an interesting game, despite the fact that the rules have been structured rather complicatedly. But this is necessary to understand the mechanics of the game and so the structure of the rules is okay, even good, especially as there are many examples to illustrate the rules and even the action cards are explained in detail. There are no questions left unanswered by the rules, which is a big bonus for the game.

In my opinion the game is especially well suited to players with little gaming experience, because the goal cards that you receive at the start of the game, kind of tell you the strategy you should follow in the course of the game. But, I have to say, those goal cards are in no way balanced or of equal value. Some of them are very easily completed and others ferry difficult to implement, which could be an obstacle for inexperienced players, because they know in theory how to win but have not much opportunity to really win the game.

Isa Schranz

Players: 2-4

Age: 102+

Time: 90+

Designer: Touko Tahkokallio

Art: Dennis Lohausen

Price: ca. 16 Euro

Publisher: Eggertspiele 2011

Web: www.eggertspiele.de

Genre: Resources management

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de en fi fr nl pl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Good but somewhat complicatedly structured rules

All the same good for inexperienced players

All in all standard resources management game

Compares to:

Il Principe, Verona, Firenze, Florenza and other resources management and development games on Renaissance Italy.

Other editions:

Z-Man, USA; Gigamic, France; Lautapelit, Finland, G3, Poland; White Goblin, Netherlands

My rating: 4

Isa Schranz:

The game has good rules and that is, next to some other positive facts, half of the success for any game and also of this one; a nice game that is also of interest for inexperienced players.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0