Players: 2-5
Time: 2-4 hours
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
Unfortunately, I think that Siena is a game that was nearly destroyed by its components. I'm going to get into it more when I talk about the individual elements, but Siena makes a crucial mistake again and again: it offers up components that provide little or no help to players in figuring out what they do.
I can understand how this came about. The game of Siena is centered around an attractive fresco painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. The fresco makes up the gameboard and is used for all the cards as well. It's attractive and good work has been done making the whole game match that authentic period style. Unfortunately this was ultimately a victory of style over substance. Bcecause the designer didn't want to lay game text on or over the painting, we end up with a relatively simple game that becomes murky, mysterious, and generally inaccessible to first-time players.
Which is a shame.
Here's what the game comes with:
- 1 gameboard
- 35 wooden discs
- 1 pawn
- 40 wooden cubes
- 93 cards
- 3 rulebooks
Gameboard: A six-panel gameboard that's long and thin, matching the Lorenzetti fesco. It's immediately striking that the very center of the gameboard is made up by the fresco and nothing else. There's no divisions of the sort that you'd expect on a gameboard. This is initially a little intimidating, especially to first-time players, but in the end it does work.
Surrounding the actual fresco are various labels and tracks. The left side of the fresco contains the city of Siena, and this is surrounded by 10 labels for the 10 districts in town, 5 at the top and 5 at the bottom. The labels are displayed in different colors (yellow, red, gold, or white), which is intended to remind you what you can do in the districts. Experienced players will be fine with these reminders, but for first-time players they're entirely opaque, a fact that isn't made easier by the the Italian names of the districts.
The right-hand side of the fresco shows the countryside and is surrounded by tracks for the five types of goods: oil, wine, corn, cloth, and spices. These aren't labeled either by name or by who can sell the goods, but again this is an issue that will only befuddle first-time players.
The rest of the board is taken up by a few roads, an initiative track, a florins (money) track, and a list of tithing requirements. There's a whole lot going on in this game, and that baroque nature ends up being one of the reasons that the decision to make the components so non-user-friendly was such a bad one.
Wooden Bits: There are 35 wooden discs, 7 in each of the player colors (red, blue, green, yellow, and orange). A black pawn is used to move the beggar about the town. Finally, 40 plain wooden cubes are used to mark goods being produced in the countryside as well as courtesans waiting at the inn in town.
Cards: The cards are actually broken into a number of different decks. There are 7 fato cards which are used for a couple of press-your-luck situations, 26 senesi cards which list 1-4 victory points each, and 8 artista cards which list 1-8 victory points each. These are all intuitive to use, once you get used to the strange names.
Much more puzzling for any first-time player are the remaining, "Siena" cards. There are about a dozen different types of cards. Many of these are only usable by players at certain ranks. Other than the relatively simple laborer/wayfarer cards, all of them have special powers. None of those powers are listed on the cards, nor are the restrictions on who can play them. All you get is a picture (part of the fresco) and an Italian name.
The fact that the cards are scattered through the rulebook, rather than having a short, simple reference for their use makes the game that much more actively difficult for anyone to try and learn.
Rulebook: And finally we come to the rulebook, which is one of the worst I've ever read. First, the translation is bad. I'll guess it wasn't made by an English speaker and it shows. Second, the organization is hard to learn from, and isn't that great for reference either. Cards are scattered throughout the book, victory points are mentioned only at the end, and the only structure centers on the three ranks that a player can hold (peasant, merchant, banker).
Combined with the board and cards, and their lack of rules text, most players are going to find it very hard to learn this game out of the box.
If you've read this far, you've no doubt discerened that I don't like the components. I was actually disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed with them. They're very pretty, yes, but combined they make it tough to learn this game.
I can say one good thing: the game turns out to be pretty simple once you dig through everything else, and after you've got just one game under your belt, I don't think the components will be much of a hinderance. As long as you never play with anyone new, who would be totally lost like you were the first time through.
However, since the components actively make it more difficult for a first-time player to play this game, I have to say they need work, and thus ignore the otherwise beautiful production. I've given the game a "2" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Siena is to raise up through the ranks from peasant to merchant to banker, and to earn victory points by giving away money, hiring artists, donating to the church, and building the "Torre del Mangia".
Setup: Each players takes all the tokens in his color and stacks three of them in a pile, to mark himself as a peasant. (He'll reduce that to a stack of two when he becomes a merchant and to no stack when he becomes a banker.)
Each player puts a pawn at 28 on the florins chart to mark his starting money. These pawns are stacked in a random order, and then that is used to mark order of richness: in any pile the player with the top marker is the richest, the player with the bottom is the poorest. The round cube is meanwhile placed on the "0" florin space, to mark that the first round hasn't yet begun.
The players are placed on the initiative trick in order of richness, e.g., the stacking order just randomly determined.
One cube, available for sale, is placed in the corn location on the board. (As noted, the fresco is used as a board; in this case the corn cube is placed directly on the fresco, but close enough to the corn track that you can figure out what it is.)
The fato and senesi decks are shuffled.
The artista deck is shuffled with the game-ending Amrogio Lorenzetti card somewhere in the bottom three cards.
Seven special Siena cards (2x via francigena, 2x piazza salimbeni, 1x courtesan's girlfriends, 1x inn, 1x bricklayers) are pulled from the Siena deck and laid out for an initial auction.
The Initial Auction: The game starts out with a set of auctions of the initial Siena cards. Each player in initiative order (going from least rich to most rich) puts up a card for auction then makes an initial bid. All auctions are simple roundabout auctions, going around until there's only one bidder left, who pays the fee and takes the card.
Players may decide not to put cards up for auction, though they're punished by not getting to participate in the next auction. When all players decide not to buy additional cards at auction (though it's still unclear to me how this comes about, if players can no longer put things up for auction once they have previously, etc.) any unauctioned cards are shuffled back into the deck.
I'll talk about the uses of these specific cards in the action phases, discussed below, but the big trick is that some of them aren't immediately useful. Some can only be used as banker actions, and so players have to decide if it's worth holding on to them, against a hand limit, for the entire game.
Now the regular game begins.
Order of Play: Players jointly engage in the following phases:
- Start a New Round
- Draw Cards
- Take Actions
Start a New Round: The round cube is advanced along the Florin track, bringing the game toward its end. Initiative order is reorganized, going from the poorest to the richest player. As we'll see this affects turn order and prices both.
Draw Cards: A number of cards are drawn equal to two times the number of players and placed face-up next to the board. Any cards with "*"s (which include any cards that weren't auctioned in that first phase, plus a few other cards) are set aside for later auction. The rest are laid out for card drafting. (This setup results in the last player[s] not getting two picks if there are any cards set aside to auction; I could never decide if this was purposeful or an omission in the rules.)
Starting with the lowest initiative player, each player optionally takes one card, then after everyone has taken a card, each one takes a second. Each player must pay for their card which is the cost shown on the card plus a modifier based on their initiative position. Players with higher initiatives must pay +1, +2, or +3 for each card, other than "0" cost cards which are always free.
There's a hand limit of 7, which may keep players from taking additional cards if they're already there.
Any cards left over after two rounds of drafting are discarded.
Auction a Card. Now if there are 1 or more "*"ed cards, the lowest value one is auctioned. This works just like the early game auction, going roundabout until one player has the sole-remaining bid. Any remaining "*"ed cards are kept over for future rounds of play.
Take Actions: Now in initiative order each player can discard or play any or all of their cards. However many of the cards are only legal for players at certain ranks (peasant/merchant/banker) to play.
After a player finishes his actions he may increase his rank if he has enough florins: 30 or more to become a merchant, 80 or more to become a banker. This will allow different actions on subsequent turns.
Peasant Cards. The main action for peasants is to play laborer/wayfarer cards. Each of these cards puts various numbers of cubes on the tracks for 3 of the 5 goods. The tracks are of variable lengths: 3 for corn, 5 for wine, 8 for oil, 7 for cloth, and 10 for spices. If a track fills, that produces a good to be sold, which is placed on the board. The peasant may then sell up to one of each of the three peasant goods (corn/wine/oil) if there's a cube ready to be sold and he played laborers for that good type (whether he produced the good or not). They're worth 8, 10, or 14 florins, based on good type.
A peasant may play a mule to allow him to sell up to 2 of each peasant good type (provided, as always, that he played laborers of the type).
A via francigena card may be played with laborer cards, and instead of selling the goods produced in Siena, the player instead sells them at a faraway market. The player chooses to draw 1 or more cards from the 7-card fato deck, and earns the sum shown on all the cards for each good, unless he drew the devil in which case he gets nothing. This can be quite a bit of money.
3 inn cards may be played for 20 florins.
Finally, the peasant may play courtesans to place courtesans at the inn and callandro to move the beggar in town--both things which can affect banker. The callandro card can be played with an inn card to move Callandro to the inn, or with other cards to move Callandro additional spaces as depicted by the green number shown on those additional cards. (Every card has a green number on i, for use with Callandro or by bankers.)
Merchant Cards: As with peasants, merchants can play laborer/wayfarer cards. Each of these tends to increase the peasant goods some and the merchant goods some. However, the merchant can only sell cloth (for 20) or spices (for 25). This also earns any bankers in the game 5 florins each.
The journey of the merchants to Florence or Arezzo cards each show two laborers (who produce goods for peasants) and one journey. A journeying merchant places his marker on the appropriate road. At the end of the turn he gets money for where he ended up (0/5/20 for Firenze, 3/10 for Arezzo, depending on which route the merchant took and how many cards he's played). The merchant continues on the journey, earning money each turn he moves, until he reaches the end or else plays a wayfarer card, which requires him to return to the city.
As with the peasant the Merchant can play 3 inn cards, courtesans, and callandros (potentially with other cards).
Whenever merchants gain money they can choose to not take 10 of it to take a senesi card which is worth 1-4 victory points. Or they can not take 15 to take 2 senesi cards, but only keep one of them. This is the first opportunity to earn victory points in the game (other than participating in banker-started auctions).
Banker Actions. While the other two ranks depend largely on playing different types of cards, bankers instead mostly circle around the city of Siena. It's a 10-space track, with most spaces giving different rewards. A banker will have one marker in the city to show his current location. When a banker takes his turn, he earns 8 florins, and then he moves 1 space clockwise on the city track. However, he can also play cards to move further if he wants. Each card has a green number (the same numbers used to give Callandros additional movement), and that number may be used to increase movement. (We assumed you don't have to use all your movement points, but it's yet another inclarity in the rules.)
Four of the spaces are yellow and give 5 florins when you end your turn there. The yellow "Palazzo Tolomei" space also causes you to stop your movement, to join a wedding procession there, unless you offer 10 florins for a gift.
Two spaces are gold, and each has 2 special cards associated with them which could have been won in auctions. They award 20 florins per card.
One of the spaces is white and has 2 special cards associated with it which could have been won in auctions. If you play one of these, you use the fato deck, like those Peasant "vias" did. You choose a number of fatos, and each is worth 7 florins unless you draw the devil.
The red "Duomo" space allows you to make a once-per-game tithe. You spend approximately half of your florins and then you draw 4 senesi cards, of which you keep 2.
The red "Torre" space lets you build on the tower. You get to build the lowest current level of the tower which costs 10 florins + 5/level + 15 for the top level - 10 if you play a bricklayer card to cover your labor cost. You get to place one of your player markers on the tower, which will later be worth 2-9 victory points, depending on what level it is.
The red "Via della Cerchia" space is relevant only because it's the entrance to the inn. If there are courtesans in the inn, you must go there (and stop) instead of advancing to the adjacent "Palazzo Tolomei". (Whether the courtesans actively pull you in or you're just forced to spend any movement points you have to go there was another thing that was never clear to me.) Else, you may enter the inn (to start an auction).
First you must deal with an courtesans, by either paying 10 flori per courtesan which removes them from the board, or else playing a courtesan's girlfriends card, which temporarily distracts them.
Second you may start an auction for an artist. You look at the top artist card, which is worth 1-8 victory points. Anyone else in the inn may pay 8 florins to also look at it, and anyone with an inn card may play an inn card to look at it. Then an auction commences. Anyone may participate (whether they saw the card or not), but merchants are required to jump bid by at least 3 each time and peasants 5. The winner gets the card, giving himself more (secret) victory points.
Also of note to the bankers circling the town is the beggar, who circles counterclockwise whenever anyone plays a callandros card. Whenever the beggar passes by a banker the banker must pay 10 florins or a guards card or take a stinginess cube. Except in the Duomo where the banker must pay 20 and can't play guards or take stinginess, or in the Inn where the banker also must pay 20, but can play guards or take stinginess.
Finally, bankers can play inn, callandros, or courtesan cards, just like all the other players. Playing callandros can be useful because he can't hit you while you're moving him.
Ending the Game: The game ends when the 8-point artist is auctioned, when the 7th level of the tower is built, or when the 20th round of play is completed.
First, all non-bankers automatically lose and are out of further scoring.
Each player gets the value of their senesi and artist cards as victory points, plus 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 9 victory points for various levels of the tower (1-7). The banker who has the most money earns +2, the banker with the least -2. The banker who built the most levels of the tower earns +2. Stinginess cubes are worth -1 for the first, -2 for the second, -3 for the third, etc.
The player with the most victory points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Siena is a pretty pure logistical game, with some auctions and plenty of card management.
As with most logistical games, in Siena you're using money to make money. The catch here is that money can both be a benefit and a deficit, but you ultimately need it to win. On the whole, Siena is quite original, but if I were to draw parallels it would be to games like Boomtown and Modern Art, which likewise mix auctions and logistics, and which provide multiple ways to earn money. The difference is that Siena is much more logistical, and much longer & more complex than the others.
The auctions in Siena are actually relatively minor. You auction some cards, then the artists at the end. Though minor, the artist auctions can be entirely critical. Nonetheless, the auctions are very simple and simplistic.
The card management is also a pretty minor element, but it's forced by the tight hand size and the fact that you may be holding cards for the end-game from an early point. You often have to make decisions about what to keep and what to throw out.
The Game Design
My initial experience of Siena was definitely tainted by all the problems with the components. However there weren't the sole issues, as I'll get to momentarily.
First, the good.
Siena's logistical system, and particularly the way that it deals with florins is great. The fact that having the highest income can be a severe disadvantage, mainly because you go last when drafting cards, makes you very wary of taking an early lead, and the interrelations of various peoples' florins remains an issue throughout the game, as players shoot upward in florins while approaching bankerhood, then abruptly drop once they reach there.
The interrelation of the three different ranks (peasant/merchant/banker) is also excellent. At each stage there's a constant push-and-pull as to whether you should stay at your current rank or advance to the next. if you're the first or the last in a particular role, you can reap some real rewards, and thus a sort of "prisoner's dilemma" is formed.
I also think the card play is pretty good, and the game is actually a lot simpler than it looks, but still has sufficient depth to remaining interesting.
But, Siena also fits into my broad category of underdeveloped games, and worse it's one of those underdeveloped games that I think could have been really great with an out-of-house developer.
Going back to the issue of the components, it's worth noting that Siena is extremely baroque. There are lots of special cases and one-time rules, as you could probably figure out from my description of the gameplay, above. This just makes the issues with the components worse, because there's all these special cases that in no way are represented by the game board or cards.
Second, the game is very long. The gamebox laughably promises 45-90 minutes. Our game took 4 hours, and skimming other discussions of this game, it looks like the normative length is 2-4 hours. In many ways the game is too simplistic and too chaotic to support that type of game length (let alone the fact that I think it's generally outside of the scope of most gameplay nowadays). Worse, the banker phase seems to take up most of that time, and it's the substantially less interesting part of the game, because your choices are much fewer, related to where you are on the board, rather than what cards you're holding. The game as a whole, but especially the banker phase, massively outstays its welcome.
Finally there's an awkwardness to various elements of the gamepaly, what I usually call the "sharp edges of undeveloped games". There are rules that are unnecessary, and that just make the game tougher than it could (should) have been. In addition, the idea of holding cards for the end-game always felt a little uncomfortable, yet playing certain cards, such as the beggars, was essentially useless early on, while playing others, particularly the courtesans, could potentially break the end-game. (If you're got a half-dozen or more courtesans lined up at th einn in advance, who would ever want to be the first banker?)
On the whole, I feel like Siena has some redeeming futures, but it's ultimately too long, too slow, and too baroque for most players. I've given it an average "3" out of "5" for Substance. Serious players of 18xx, Power Grid or other long logistical games will rate it higher, while players who prefer lighter Eurogames will rate it lower.
Conclusion
Siena felt to me like an unfinished product. The very poor utility of the game components and the disorganized, hard-to-read rules unfortunately color most of the gameplay experience. There's an interesting logistical game behind all of that, and players willing to dive into a long, tough game will probably enjoy it, because it's got some neat points, but I wouldn't generally recommend the game.
