This week we unexpectedly managed to get to try Palazzo, as Mark K had car problems. This seemed like a certain winner as it is designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Alea. The idea behind the game is to construct beautiful palaces, which are assessed at the end of the game. A palace’s value is determined by its height, the number of doors and windows it contains, and whether it is made of one or more building materials.

On a player’s turn, he has a choice of taking money, building part of a palace or palaces, or rebuilding a previously built palace. Taking money involves the active player drawing two money cards (which come in three different currencies) and all other players taking one card. Building is a bit more involved. Firstly a player draws two tiles (representing a building storey constructed of one type of building material and displaying between 1 and 3 windows/doors) and places one in the Warehouse location and the other in one of four Quarry locations. Then he can choose to either buy tiles from the warehouse at a set price or auction the tiles placed at the next quarry location. Tiles bought or won at auction are then immediately used to start new buildings or to add to existing buildings. Sometimes, this leads to sub-optimal building layouts hence the need for the final rebuilding action, to improve the scoring potential of your palaces. However, rebuilding effectively uses up two turns and this action needs to be used sparingly as there aren’t that many turns in the game. The game ends once the fifth Game End tile is drawn during a building action and everyone’s palaces are valued. The player with the most points wins.

There are a few nice elements to this game and there is a reasonable amount to think about. Judging the auctions correctly is important in order to get valuable tiles without overpaying for them. In our game, I managed to get one valuable palace and a couple of reasonably good ones, without having to rebuild. Nige and John both rebuilt and ended with a couple of zero-point or negative buildings. This allowed me to claim a good victory, although it ended up closer than we thought it was going to be at one stage. We all quite liked this but it wasn’t quite as gripping as we thought it might be. There is certainly enough to think about but it just seemed a bit dull to me. We’ll need to try it again now everyone’s got a better handle on the potential value of certain key tiles.