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Review of Florenza: The Card Game
Blurb from the publisher: 'In Florenza: The Card Game, the players are the heads of the most powerful families in Florence during the Renaissance period. They will try to hire the best artists to create the monuments of the city. Meanwhile, they can build buildings or join guilds to enhance their families’ power, or to gain more resources and money. In order to complete these projects, they must collect the right combinations of resources.'
What you get: Your EUR 29 will buy you Florenza: The Card Game, a two to four player one-hour card game. The box contains the rulebook in Italian, English and German (the same rulebook can also be found on the company's website), as well as 330 cards (in two different sizes, standard and small) as follows: 27 monument cards, 28 money cards (florins, the then money of Florence), 76 Florenza cards (in seven categories, residences, workshops, guilds, district churches, district buildings, family palaces), 86 resource cards (in six categories, metal wood, marble, fabric, wood and spice), 2 trilingual summary cards, 1 captain of the people card, 85 artist cards (sculptors, architects and painters), 17 location cards, 4 family cards, 3 anonymous artist cards, and 1 action marker card.
The game is component neutral. All the text and names on the cards are written in Renaissance Italian, but this is only intended as decoration since pictographs on the cards explain everything. If one can read any of the three languages of the rulebook to explain the game, you are good to go.
Gameplay: F:TCG is the card game iteration (d'oh!) of Florenza, a board game with the same setting and goals, similar artwork and similar feel that came out in 2010 by Placentia Games. I can't comment on it not having perused it; it was however well-received, having won the 2010 Lucca Games Best Publishing Project and being a 2011 Ludoteca Ideale Official Selection Winner. As with many heavier boardgames, the company decided to produce a shorter, card game version.
The comp copy I received was one of Essen's demo copies, thus I cannot comment how things look like when the box is opened. My cards were all in plastic zip log bags, all sorted the way they should have been for a game.
The game lasts for five rounds, with four phases per round. To win it, players collect prestige through building monuments, palaces, churches and other buildings, potentially through the artists that were hired to complete the projects, the complete sets of the family palace, the district church and the district building, the guild cards played, the resources and the florins at hand as well as being the captain of the people at the end of the game.
Setup is different. Card usage depends on whether two, three or four people are competing, with the cards indicating in which games they can be used. One starts with a family, 300 florins, 1 resource card of each kind and 5 Florenza cards. The four phases in a round are completed by all four players before proceeding to the next phase.
On phase 1, artists and monuments are drawn and placed in the middle of the table. The artists are renewed each round, while the monuments stack up with the left overs from the previous rounds.
On phase 2, Florenza cards are drawn. Each player draws four, plus one for each residence card he has built in front of him. Availability changes each round, and cards from different decks (with different strength and capabilities) are used.
It is on phase 3 that the players can act, starting from the captain and going clockwise while performing one action each. People who have residences or preachers have additional actions. The actions to be played are playing a Florenza card, completing a monument, reserving a monument, reserving an artist, activating a location card, sending out workers, going to the market or searching for inspiration.
To play a card one needs to pay the cost in resources. Having played it and depending on its type, he might be rewarded with additional income at the end of each round, extra actions, drawing additional Florenza card from the following round or even prestige points at the end of the game. Forget any monopolizing tactics; fielding the same card twice is not permitted.
To hire an artist the only thing a player needs to do is choose him and pay him. Named artists demonstrate their cost as well as the range of the prestige points that they might earn for the player. Needless to say, they are more expensive than the anonumous artists who do not earn presitge points but can complete projects anyway.
Completing a monument requires paying its value in florins, while also having the needed artists.
If this can't be immediately done, reserving a monument is a valid option. One can take a monument and keep it face down in front of him, so that it can be completed in the following round. Attention though; an uncompleted monument will cost the player its prestige value. One should better be sure about what he reserves.
The same is valid for hiring an artist. Reserve him by keeping him in front of you face down. Yet, if he does not perform by the end of the next round, you will lose his prestige value. To say that the game is reminiscent of project management is not entirely untrue.
Activating a location card is straightforward. Flip the card over to either gain a resource, or spend a resource to gain money, or exchage a resource with another resource, or, finally, be the captain for the next round. Seeing how the captain plays first and gives prestige at the end of the game, it is an advantage that has to be properly considered.
By sending out workers the player gains florins.
By going to the market, one can opt to either sell or buy a resource for money, or exchange resources from his own hand to a resource from the supply.
Finally, the rather pompously named 'searching for inspiration' means that the player draws a Florenza card from the current deck.
Phase 4 is the end of the round and more of a bookkeeping phase. Discarded cards are unused, income is collected, the captain of the people is designated (either because somebody took the card, or if nobody did, the player to the left of the previous captain), and location cards are reset. Easy overall, no?
The strong points: It's not at all hard to set up or play the game, even though the first time the explosion of cards in colour on the table might appear daunting. Since the Essen Spiel demo already and before playtesting it at home, it was pretty clear what has to be done and how. Expect a learning time of a maximum 15 minutes for the eight pages (with many pictures and examples) of rules in your language of choice.
The gameplay is engaging and provides options. It is based on having multiple choices whose advantages can be of a nominal value which cannot be easily discerned from the beginning. I enjoyed the asymmetrical distribution of some of the categories of cards, something that makes the game a tad more complex; resources do not come into identical amounts (e.g. there are 11 metals but 21 woods) something that is also valid for the Florenza cards (e.g. there are 9 residences but 13 workshops). It goes without saying that thinking only what you can do is a sure way to lose. Interaction however is not that heavy, limiting itself mostly to indirectly foiling your opponents' plans and steering them towards a direction that is more profitable to you. Or overwhelming them by your superior number of actions, as the case might be.
The artwork somehow deserves to be both in the strong points as well as the weak ones. When it comes to functionality, the cards serve the game great. Having cards in two different sizes really facilitates things visually, no matter how cramped the table gets.
The weak points: I have some gripes with the game, and in particular its feel. Maybe it's personal, but I like the uncertainty of things of things happening, and the feeling that an effort was made to obtain what is needed. As much as the gameplay is about resource collection and management, it felt kind of automatic, effortless, and as such, partially disappointing. There was no excitement or uncertainty that things could follow a totally disastrous course. The gameplay, once learned, is out of the way and does not impose on the enjoyment of the game. However, there was no strong sensation of building up a city (which other games succeed in giving), since there are no real dangers. Even by finishing last something has been accomplished and no calamity has been faced. When it comes to drawing the players into a theme, be it building a renaissance city or other, F:TCG kind of missed the target for my personal taste.
Maybe it was partially due to the artwork itself. As much as I enjoyed the detail of having Renaissance Italian of that era on the cards as flavour text, the imagery didn't really convince me. It just feels a bit more generic and bland than what a game with this theme could have had. Having written that though, I don't believe it was the artwork only (which, some of the people around the table actively enjoyed).
Even though this is a balanced game, expect experience players to win the first game or two due to their most intimate knowledge of the little details. Additionally, there is one sure lose strategy: never let the opponents stack additional actions from the first rounds. Go and obtain those actions yourself. Winning the game under such a disadvantage is extremely difficult, if not nigh-on-impossible.
With so many cards being open in the middle as well as stacks to choose from and that family grounds of each player, The game needs space. The configuration however is visible no matter which side one sits from, so no worries there.
Conclusion: Being a fan of city development games, I will play Florenza: The Card Game at regular intervals even though it's not what will primarily draw me to the gaming table. It is however a nice civ above filler level, and can warm things up before moving onto the more serious stuff. It's definitely worth checking out.
For more info on Florenza The Card Game and Placentia Games, visit their website at placentiagames.it.
