Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Last night we had two friends absent from our weekly role-playing slot, so we turned to a new boardgame brought especially for the occasion by alaimacerc.

The game was Palazzo, a 2-4 player auction and building game by the nigh-divine Reiner Knizia. We had three players, alaimacerc, sammywol and myself, and settled down to read the rules and get started. The rules, in translation anyway, are a little opaque in places, but we got it figured out eventually and were stuck in. The object is to build Palazzi with as many floors (up to 5) as possible, with as many windows/doors as possible (1 to 3 on each building tile) and, if possible, from a single building material. There are three materials, brick, sandstone and marble, and each building tile is of one of the three materials only.

Like many of Knizia's games your options on each turn are relatively few and exclusive of each other. In this case it was Get Money, Turn Up New Building Parts and Auction/Buy One or More, or Rebuild A Part of One of Your Current Palazzi.

Getting Money: Turn up currency cards (in number equal to the number of players plus 1), take two and the other players get one each in turn from the remaining face up cards.

Turn Up Buildings and Auction/Buy: You turn up two building tiles and put one on the Warehouse in the middle of the board, where it's available to buy. Pu the other on one of four Quarries, where it and whatever else is on the Quarry is available for auction if the Architect pawn happens to end up there. (He moves each time you draw building tiles by some algorithm which is usually just one space clockwise round the Quarries.) You then buy or auction as you prefer. I'll describe auctions in a moment.

Rebuild a Bit of a Palazzo: Take a piece out of an existing Palazzo and put it in front of you, or move a piece from in front of you back into any of your Palazzi or chuck it away into the discards.

The auctions are tricky-ish. The biding is done with your currency cards, but their values are calculated like Rummy hands; only matching currencies (there are three different ones) can be added together. Currency cards range in value from 2 to 7, Wild cards exist and are worth 2. Special bids can be made of three wild cards, worth 15, or three of a kind in the three different currencies, also worth 15 and counted as wild. Once you start bidding you can only bid in that colour or with a wild card(s). If you overpay because you can't make the exact amount that's just too bad.

Once you've bought or won an auction the building tiles you've bought have to be built. The tiles are numbered 1-5 as floors, and you can only build a higher tile on a lower tile (or straight on the ground, starting a new palazzo), though you can skip floors for a shorter overall building if you like.

So, the game itself. It's important to balance grabbing currency and grabbing buildings. Initially we thought that alaimacerc had overreached himself by building so many one-floor palazzi (one-floor buildings are worth a penalty at the end) but we were wrong. It's important I think to have at least three palazzi growing to have a shot at first place.

Handling the placing of the building tiles on the quarries is important too. As the architect moves around he might not be on the really valuable pile when you need him to be so you have to pay careful attention to his movement and where he's likely to end up in a couple of turns. It's also worth tracking as best you can what other players can afford to pay for any given auction, as that lets you know how the next auction is likely to go should they get involved.

In all, it's pretty intense, and should fly by once you're used to the turn structure and the allowable actions. We dragged our feet a bit, 'cos we always do and it was our first time, but I'd say you should be able to get it down to 45-50 minutes with 3 players.

The end result was a solid win for alaimacerc. Scores were 48, 40, 36 to alaimacerc, sammywol and me, in that order.

Reviewed and discussed in much greater detail at Boardgame Geek, if you're interested.