Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 30 minutes
The Components
Patrician comes in a bookshelf box with a small set of components:
Game Board: A four-panel gameboard with two sides. One side shows 9 cities, for use with 2-4 players and the other shows 10 cities, for use with 5 players. The board features pretty muted colors and thus looks like a nice period piece. Each city’s main purpose is just to hold the city’s towers, but there’s a nice picture of each city and a rough street map, all of which adds to the theming of the game.
Tower Pieces: These are stacking wooden pieces in the player colors: black, blue, red, yellow, and white. They’re quite large, somewhat abstract, and look good when stacked up. There are variable numbers of the different colors to support different numbers of players, something that some players find annoying but I usually appreciate because it implicitly lowers the price of the game.
Prestige Tokens: These are cardboard scoring tokens, 2 each for the 10 different cities. Players collect them as they win cities, making it very easy to score the cities at the end.
Cards: 55 cards in the 10 colors of the cities. The cards are all medium-weight linen-textured stock. A pretty good job has been done differentiating these cities, so that the two blues (light blue and dark blues) are the only ones even somewhat similar. Besides its city crest, many cards also show a portrait or special action icon.
Overall the components in Patrician are great quality and easy to use. The individual elements are attractive, but nothing really jumps out at me. I’ve thus given it a high “4” out of “5” for Style: very good.
The Gameplay
The object of Patrician is to collect the most points by controlling high towers and collecting patrician portraits.
Setup: Each player is given a set of tower pieces in his color. Each player also gets an initial hand of 3 cards from amidst a small set of starting cards.
The board is set up by placing the appropriate scoring markers next to each city. The big cities get a 9 and a 6, the medium cities get a 7 and a 4, and the small cities get a 5 and a 2. Each city also gets a single card laid face-up next to it.
Order of Play: The standard order of play is:
- Play a Building Card & Place a Tower Piece
- Take a Special Action
- Draw a Building Card & Refill
Playing a Building Card & Placing: The player plays one of his building cards and places a tower in the associated city. A tower piece may go on top of either of the two towers in the city.
Each card has a second element on it: a second city icon (which allows a placement of a second tower piece in the same city); a patrician portrait (which gives a bonus score at endgame); or a special action icon (which will be described shortly).
Scoring a City. Each city has a limit as to how many towers can be placed there: either 9, 7, or 5, depending on the size of the city. When that many pieces have been placed (using up all the cards for the city, as it happens), the city is scored.
The player with the most tower pieces in the higher tower takes the higher value influence token; ties for who has the most pieces are broken by who played last (highest) in the tower.
The player with the most tower pieces in the lower tower similarly takes the lower value influence token.
Taking a Special Action: Some cards have a “tower movement” special action icon on them. When playing one of these cards the player may now move any one tower piece from the top of one tower to the top of the other tower in the same city (except he can’t do it in the city he just placed in or a city where he has no presence).
Drawing & Refilling a Card: Finally the active player takes the card sitting face-up next to the city he placed in. If there is no card there (because the game is almost over) or the player played a card with the “any card” special action icon, he may instead draw a card from any city. Afterward the drawn card is replaced with a new card from the draw pile.
Ending the Game: The game ends after the draw pile is emptied, then all the face-up cards on the board are then, then each player plays all his cards.
Now, scoring occurs. If any city was (by mistake) not scored, it is now. Then each player sorts the cards he played by patrician portrait (if any). Each set of 3 of the same portrait is worth 6 bonus victory points.
The player with the most combined points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Though it’s got enough bits to qualify it as a board game, at heart Patrician is a Michael Schacht card game, a medium in which he’s done some great work. Coloretto is his best known (and most popular) work, but In Limbo is another recent entrant as is The Hollywood! Card Game, a collaboration with Bruno Faidutti.
As with those games, Patrician is at heart a set collection game--though through the use of pieces (and the ability to slightly move them around), Patrician grows beyond the set collection genre to instead become its close cousin, majority control.
The Game Design
There’s a lot to like in Patrician and that comes primarily through how the game overloads several decisions upon each other. When you play a card you have to think not only about which cities you want majorities in, but also which cards you want to draw. The card draw decision has two levels of options: besides seeking certain colors, you might specifically be wanting double-city cards, patrician portrait cards, or some of the special powers.
By mooshing all of these decisions together, Patrician transforms a fairly light game into one which requires some thought, thus slotting it into a style of play that Schacht frequently develops for: fillers with depth.
I’ve enjoyed Patrician each time I’ve played, feeling like there are always interesting decisions to make. Only one thing slightly unsettles me: the exacting limitation of the cards. In most set-collection or majority-ontrol games, you can’t accurately assess how well you or the other players can do in reaching majorities because of the uncertain count of placements available. For example in Michael Schacht’s China, each color of card can be played to two different provinces (excepting purple) and can additional be used for two different majorities. Similarly in the Michael Schacht set collection games Hansa and Coloretto there’s always some number of pieces that don’t come up during plan, thus you can never guarantee seeing all the cards you’d expect.
Patrician instead has strict limitations: each card can only be played to one location, and every card will come up during play. Now, I’m not confident that this causes problems, but I’ve seen a few different players who felt it was awkward, and it makes me a little wary.
That’s probably the only thing that keeps me from giving Patrician a perfect score: otherwise it’s one of the best two fillers I’ve played all year, with nice color, interesting choices, and quick play. I’ve given it a high “4” out of “5” for Substance.
Conclusion
Michael Schacht’s new majority-control game, Patrician offers deep decisions and quick gameplay, making it one of the best fillers of the year.
