I had been expecting there to be six of us this week so had lined up to play Power Grid, but John rang at the last minute to say he was unable to make it, so I quickly changed things to try and get another two games off my unplayed list. The first was Il Principe, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published by Z-Man Games.

Il Principe is about competing princes in Renaissance Italy. The aim is to gain Victory Points by building cities, influencing regions and possessing certain building roles to help the city builders. Players get an income of 5 coins at the start of each turn, together with 4 building cards in a variety of 5 colours. Two of these are kept in hand and 2 are made available for auction. All the cards made available are sorted by colour and all the cards in each colour are auctioned off as a lot. The auction winner takes the cards into his hand and can immediately choose to exchange building cards and pay a building cost to found a city (with each of the 15 cities requiring a different combination of cards). Building the city rewards the founder with a number of VPs and the ability to place a number of influence shields in regions neighbouring the city. Once all the cards have been auctioned, each player in turn has the option of building a city or laying cards of one colour face up in front of him. These join any cards played in previous rounds or used in building cities. Whoever displays the most and second-most cards in each colour controls that colour’s major and minor building roles for the following turn and will receive VPs for any city built during that turn using building cards of the matching colour. The game ends either when all the cities have been built or when the building card deck is exhausted, at which stage final VPs are awarded for control of the regions, most coins, most building cards left in hand and each role card controlled. Most VPs wins.

Money seemed very tight in the game and the result ended up being very close. The game also seemed to go very quickly, which is a good sign. I’m not sure any of us really worked out what the best strategy was and the close finish suggests that the game is fairly well balanced. The final bonuses proved critical with Mark K taking the victory by a single point. We all really enjoyed Il Principe and the quick playing time should mean it sees a fair bit of play. Nige immediately asked Mark to order him a copy so it must have been good.