RogerBW's Blog

On a Wednesday night in Cambridge, with the usual GM unable to run the game we'd planned, four of us got together to play Princes of the Renaissance, a Martin Wallace design from 2003 not currently in print.

There are quite a lot of moving parts, but they all fit together well once one's got the hang of it.

Currencies are money and influence; some of the things one buys with them change value based on the status of the relevant city, which is affected by wars… which are started by the players, who pay influence to be on one side or the other, then get paid whether or not they actually win the fight. The main game is clearly meant to be about manipulating the cities' tile values, but there are lots of other things one can do too.

I did relatively little with the wars, but stocked up on merchants, and ended up coming second by one point – rather closer than I'd expected given that I had tiles from the bottom three cities. It's an intriguing game, though (at about 2½ hours) not one I'd want to play very often unless I were at a whole lot more boardgame sessions than I manage now.