Il Principe is a difficult game to categorise as it involves card management, bidding, area control and role taking.  However, rather than delivering a confusing mix of genres, it delivers a tight game which I really enjoyed.

Players are building cities and institutions in Italy to earn victory points (VPs).  At the start of each round, players receive 5 cash and 4 cards – the cards come in 5 colours each representing a different city institution (town hall, university, etc.).  The players keep 2 cards and the rejected cards are combined and auctioned off colour-by-colour.  After the auctions, a player can either (a) use cards and cash to build a city, or (b) place as many cards face-up in front of them of one colour showing control over the 5 different institutions.

There are 10 role cards (5 major & 5 minor in each colour).  The player with the most face-up cards of each colour gets the matching-coloured major role uses the role’s benefit, e.g. the player with the most face-up green cards gets the Banker role card which earns them 2 extra cash.  Read the rest of this entry »

Occasionally, a friend of mine runs an all-day boardgames tournament at the games shop (Eclectic Games) in Reading (UK) where anyone can turn up and play.  The day consists of around 5 or 6 games each played with 3 or 4 players and the people in each group changes every game so you get to play with most people present.  Saturday was the fourth of these tournament days (called BADGER which stands for Berskhire All-Day Gaming Extravaganza in Reading) and I got to play games that were mostly new to me.

The games I played were: Read the rest of this entry »