Players: 2-5
Time: 90-120 minutes
Difficulty: 5 (of 10)
The Components
Il Principe comes with a small set of components in a somewhat too large box:
- 1 gameboard
- 100 building cards
- 15 city cards
- 5 family cards
- 10 role tiles
- 40 money chips
- 60 shield counters
- 1 Il Principe marker
Gameboard: A single-panel gameboard. It contains a map of northern Italy, a scoreboard, and spaces to place the ten role cards. It's all attractive and period-appropriate. The map is somewhat small, but as long as you stack your markers, it'll be fine.
Cards: The cards are all half-size, printed full-color on the front, black& white on the back, on medium weight cardstock.
The 100 building cards just show one of the five building colors. They're simple, but attractive nonetheless.
The 15 city cards show the items to be built during the game. Each shows a card cost, a gold cost, a vicory point reward, and a shield rewad. Good iconography is used to make all of these items really obvious.
The five family cards each show a player's shield, so you know who's who. Each card also helpfully lists the phases of the game.
Cardboard Bits: Each of these items is printed full-color on sturdy, linen-textured cardboard.
The role tiles--two per color--each show their prestige value and list their special power.
The money comes in two denominations, that are different sizes and colors.
The Il Principe marker just reminds you of who the (constantly changing) first player is. It comes with a plastic stand so you can stand it up.
Rulebook: A short 4-page rulebook, printed black and white. Two of the pages are English, two are German. They're very succint--too much so in some cases--but I figured out the game after a couple of read throughs.
Box: It's worth briefly noting that the box is way too big for the components, which just take up a small corner of the box. However, the price is reasonable, and word I hear is that a bigger box made the game paradoxically cheaper, because it kept the board from being folded.
Overall the quality of the components is pretty average, though I would have preferred bigger cards and full-color rules and card backs. The artwork on all the components is quite good, and gives a good feel for Renaissance Italy. There's also been some good work done to use clear icons and generally make the game easier to play. As such I've marked the game as "4" out of "5" in Style: above average.
The Gameplay
The object of Il Principe is to win prestige (victory points) by building cities, controlling roles, and gaining dominion over the countryside.
Setup: Each player selects a house and takes the shields for that house. One is placed at "0" on the score track. A starting player is selected and given "Il Principe" marker.
The first 4 city cards are flipped face up.
Order of Play: The players jointly play through four phases each round:
- Collect Resources
- Auction Cards
- Play Cards
- Allocate Roles
Collect Resources: Each player takes 5 money and 4 new building cards. Each player then chooses 2 building cards from his hand and places them face-down for auction that round.
The Cards. The building cards are resources needed to build cities and control roles. They come in five colors: red, green, yellow, blue, and white. There are 20 of each. The cards represent politics, culture, business, nobility, and religion, but sadly they're just colored cards, rather than taking advantage of this theming.
Auction Cards: The face-down cards are now turned face-up, and are sorted by color. A series of up to 5 auction lots is now, held, one per color. Lots with the fewest cards are auctioned first, moving up to the lots with the most cards.
Starting to the left of Il Principe, each player passes or increases the previous bid, until there is only one player left. He pays his bid and takes all the cards of that color. Perhaps equally important, he also gets a free chance to build a city.
The Il Principe marker always moves to the winner of an auction, which can sometimes allow for some minor strategy.
Building a City. A player may build any of the four face-up cities. Each has a requirement of 3-5 cards and 3-5 money. (Small cities take 3 of each, medium 4, and large 5.) The card requirements are all very regular. If there's three cards, that's one each of three colors, four is one pair and one each of two other colors, and five is one pair and one each of three other colors.
As reward a player first earns 4, 6, or 8 victory points. Then he gets to place either 1 or 2 shields on the board, in regions adjacent to his city. Again we find symmetry here: small cities are adjacent to 1 region, medium cities to 2, and large cities to 3. Shields on the board help you win extra points for majority control at the end of the game.
However, there's a catch to building: other players get points for your building too. This is based upon roles, which players will earn through played cards (on which, more in a second). There's a major role and a minor role for each of the 5 colors. Whoever owns a major role gets 2 points every time a city is built with that color cards, and whoever owns a minor role gets 1 point.
Cards used for building a city are placed face-up in front of a player, organized by color, and as noted they're used for role selection.
Play Cards: Now each player may either build a city or play cards. Building a city works just like those free builds you get when you win an auction. Play cards means that you can play 1 or more cards of the same color face-up in front of you. You're not building anything with them, but you will get to use the cards to secure roles momentarily.
Allocate Roles. The players now turn in any roles they had in previous rounds and they're then reallocated.
For each color the player with the most face-up cards in front of him of that color gets the major role and the player with the second most gets the minor role. Players may have these cards avialable, face-up, thanks to building cities or just playing the cards.
If there's a tie for the major role the tied players have an auction to determine who gets it and there's no minor role. If there's a tie for the minor role, the tied players have an auction.
In any case, if a player takes a major role tile he must flip half of his face-up cards face-down. They may be worth victory points later on, but they aren't used to determine role allocation in later rounds.
Each role also has a special power which is used as soon as the player gets it. They are:
- Green: Flip up a face-down card
- White: Take 1 VP
- Red: Take 1 building card
- Blue: Place 1 shield
- Yellow: Take 2 money
Ending the Game: The game ends either when there aren't enough building cards to give the players all their specified amount, in which case half of the regular total are auctioned and the round otherwise plays out as usual, or when there are less than 4 city cards left to build.
(Both games, some players were caught by surprise when there weren't enough building cards on the last round; one of the players later suggested that you create a stash of cards equal to 4x the number of players. When you go into that, you know the next round is the last one.)
After the round finishes, a number of final scores are determined:
- The final holders of the major/minor roles get +2/+1 points, since there won't be any more building for them to score off of.
- +2 for whoever has the most building cards in hand
- +2 who whoever has the most money
- +2 per face-up card in your shortest suit (which tends to be 2-3 in the games I've played)
- +5/+2 for the majority/second-majority control of each region on the board
I dearly wish this list of scoring had been printed somewhere, say in some of the blank spaces on the board.
Relationships to Other Games
Il Principe is a game which features auctions, majority control, set collection, role selection, and logistics. Though it blends quite a few different game systems, it does so in a relatively seamless manner.
Overall, I'd call it a logistical game, since it's ultimately about carefully balancing your money between auctions and building cities. Money can end up being a pretty huge constraint, so look toward other building/auction games like Amun-Re or Power Grid for similar gameplay.
The auctions are very simplistic. There's just round-about until everyone drops out. I wouldn't find them very interesting if it weren't for the fact that money is so short. Much like Michael Schacht's Industria this provides a quick constraint on most auction rounds, and likewise gives incentive to players to jump-bid to their final price, lest another player do so first.
There's two types of majority control. First is the control of the game board, which is limited by which cities are build, thus providing a game system that must be played in order to achieve the majorities that you want. Last year's Ark does sort of the same thing, but it's more successful here because the game systems are more tightly integrated. The placement of cards in front of you also is a type of majority control, since the two players with majorities get a reward (roles), however it also looks somewhat like set collection, and indeed shows how close the two types of gameplay are.
Finally we come to the role selection, which just like the majority control is influenced by a different system, here the card play. Other than that, the roles are interesting and unique and may cause players to work toward achieving certain ones.
On the whole all of these systems are intermingled to a large degree, which is ultimately what makes the game unique, not necessarily how the individual systems are developed.
The Game Design
Il Principe is a very clever, gamer's game and if anything its failing might be "too much of a good thing".
As already noted, the various systems in Il Principe work together like clockwork. My first time through I had trouble figuring out the multiple results of each action, but I felt like I should be able to, with a bit of additional concentration. On my second game I played much better because I better understood the tightly connected systems. Nonetheless, Il Principe remains a brain burner that requires lots of thinking to make the optimal moves--thinking that is sometimes a bit unintuitive at first.
Most of the game is held together by tight game systems, and thus tough decisions. I've already discussed this in regards to the tightness of money in the auction, but it also shows up elsewhere. Maintaining majorities on the board and in colors of cards become games of brinkmanship, as you try and figure out which narrow leads you'll be able to maintain.
There's also some really interesting, orthagonal types of strategy that you'll figure out as you get further into the game. One of these relates to which cards you decide to sacrifice to auction. The obvious answer is to throw out cards that don't help you build, but an alternative, and often successful, strategy is to offer up cards that will encourage other players to build buildings which will get you points through your current roles. You don't get quite as many points as if you concentrated on building, but on the other hand you have your hand of cards still available to play in future rounds.
As you might expect, there's a lot of different strategies in Il Principe. After two games I suspect you generally want to keep your hand in all of them--building, roles, and majorities alike--but even if that's true, the variety keeps you constantly on your toes and makes the game interesting.
If Il Principe has any flaw, it's solely in its slightly unintive nature.
On the whole, I think Il Principe is a strong and thoughtful game; I've thus given it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance, and I'd give it full ratings if it were easier to play or if I was convinced there was true differentiation in strategies.
Conclusion
Il Principe is a tough game, but it's also an interesting one with lots of strategic depth and interesting gameplay. As such, I think it's one of the better gamer's games I've seen this year, and recommend it to anyone who's willing to put some thought and work into playing.
