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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Tenki Games | Comuni

Comuni

Price: £29.99

Board Game; 2-5 Players; Ages 12+ by Tenki Games In the 12th Century, in the north of Italy, there were strong cities, ruled by themselves with their own territories and army and each one with own characteristics. They were called COMUNI. The relationship among them was a more or less a pacific coexistence but the cultural, military and Economic competition was always very high. In this game each player rules a particular COMUNE and has to increase the wealth of the city. To do this he must build structures that are the core of the Economic, Military, Cultural and Religious life. At the same time all the player must be aware of the invasion that can come from outside and if necessary must be able to collaborate to defeat them. Comuni is a game of strategy, more suitable for the experienced players. The core of the game is trying to acquire \'projects of buildings\' (cards) that can be automatically transformed in buildings and protection walls (and subsequent upgrades). The acquisition of the projects is made through a bidding system. The buildings can be of four types (Economic, Military Cultural and Religious) that give different resources. The resources give different advantages during the game in the bidding phase, when you transform projects into buildings etc.... The projects cards are divided in four different decks, at the end of each of them, an invasion comes, each time stronger. The invasion hits all players and during the invasion each player must defend his city. The players also can (and have an incentive) to collaborate to fight the aggression together. At the end of the four invasions the game ends. The key element of this game is the ability to plan a successful strategy predicting what will be the situation several turns in advance. Game is balanced, with no luck and no dice. GAME REVIEW FROM COUNTER MAGAZINE Tenkigames 2-5 players, 90 minutes designed by Acchittocca reviewed by Jimmy Sayle Italian design team Acchittocca made their debut in 2006 with Leonardo da Vinci, in which players create inventions in Leonardo\'s laboratory. That game contained an interesting variant of the worker placement mechanism, but many gamers felt frustrated by a large element of luck in the endgame. I am glad to report that Comuni has no such problems. City development in medieval Italy is a familiar theme in European games. Here players construct buildings in four categories: economic, military, cultural and religious. Each building category is associated with its own currency, represented by cubes of one colour, and each currency has specific uses in the game. Buildings are not only the main way of scoring victory points, but also allow you to get hold of cubes of their associated colour. Buildings are made of cards, and much of the interactive play is concerned with card acquisition. Four invasions will occur during the course of the game, and these will be of increasing severity. You will have to defend your city, and the mechanism for this is the most interesting feature of the game. As in Leonardo, the initial set-up is asymmetrical. You will start with a handful of cubes, but the colour combination of these depends on which city you are playing. A player turn consists of several phases, but most of these are trivial. The important ones are the project phase and the construction phase. In the project phase you have a choice: bid for cards, collect cards or collect cubes. Bidding for cards consists of placing one of your three bidding dobbers beside one of several sets of cards that are arranged on the board. The number of card sets available depends on the number of players, and each set consists of either one, two or three cards. You may place gold (economic) cubes alongside your dobber, and this will be necessary if you are bidding for a choice set because other players can displace your dobber with a higher bid. If this happens you can either take your dobber and any gold cubes back home again, or else pay a brown (religious) cube to move your bid to another card set. If at the beginning of your project phase you already have one or more bids on the board, you may instead opt to take cards - you simply pick up all the card sets that you have bid for and pay any gold cubes to the bank. Then you must replenish the board from the current deck of cards. There are four decks, and each time one of these is exhausted the normal sequence of play is suspended for an invasion. Your third option in the project phase is to collect cubes. Your city has a small base income, but most of your income comes from buildings. For each of the four categories of building you may take a number of cubes of the appropriate colour equal to the level of the highest building. However, once you have done this you cannot take income of that colour again until you have done some more building in that category. Construction consists of getting cards out of your hand and onto the table. Cards have two features: a colour that usually corresponds to one of the building categories (there are a few wild cards) and a value in the range 1-4. To build the first level of a building you simply need a card of the right colour. Buildings can have up to four levels, and when you build a higher level the value of the card must be at least equal to the level. You immediately score victory points equal to the level you have just built, so that a level 4 building is worth a total of 10 points. You are restricted to a single build action unless you buy additional ones with white (cultural) cubes, and white cubes can also be used to boost the values of cards. At the end of the construction phase you have to discard down to two cards in hand, so you won\'t get far without white cubes. For each of the four categories there is a guild master tile, and this is held by the player who has scored the most victory points for that category so far. These are worth competing for because they bring victory points and bonus income. The other thing you can do during the construction phase is build walls to defend your city against invasions. Like buildings these can have up to four levels, and the rules for their construction are the same except that all card colours are valid. Which brings us to the invasions. The first invasion is of base strength 4, which means that the least prestigious city (the back marker on the scoring track) needs to find 4 points worth of defence. But if you are 10 points ahead of that player you will need to find 4+10=14 points of defence, because your city is a juicier target for plundering. You defend with black (military) cubes, which can be used in two ways. If you put them in your right hand you are using them in a cooperative way. When players reveal the contents of their right hands, all players get defence points equal to the total number of cubes committed by all players, and the players who committed the most cubes to this common defence league stand to get some bonus victory points for heroism - provided they succeed in repelling the invaders. But players who are less public-spirited will have been building walls, and they will have some cubes in their left hands. When players open their left hands, each cube is assigned to a wall card where it is worth one defence point more than the level of wall on the wall card on which it stands. So 4 cubes on a level 4 wall are worth a mighty 14 defence points. If you still don\'t have enough defence points, your city gets plundered and you lose victory points equal to the deficit. And there is a nasty twist here: this penalty is awarded in the form of negative victory point chips that will count against you at the end of the game. You don\'t move backward on the scoring track, so your exposure to further invasions is not reduced. Conversely, the heroism points don\'t increase your exposure as they are not added to your score until the end of the game. Comuni is clearly aimed at the gamers\' market and offers plenty to think about. The bidding mechanism is simple but entertaining. To compete for a good 3-card you set you usually need to bid at least two gold cubes, but a player with a healthy supply of brown cubes can do well by making cheeky bids. Some of these will not be challenged, and those that are can simply be moved to another, less attractive card set. The construction phase presents a dilemma. You need to get an income stream going, and this means using white cubes to build as fast as possible in as many categories as you can. And the faster you build, the better are your chances of grabbing and retaining the guild master tiles. But buildings score victory points, and these have to be defended when the invasions come. If you\'ve been constructing lots of buildings you have probably been neglecting your city walls, and you\'ve probably been building your white cube income at the expense of your black. If you race into the lead with no walls and few black cubes you had better hope that some of the other players are pursuing a cooperative defence strategy. The later invasions have base strengths of 12 and 16, and if the other players can muster 14 defence points by manning a single high wall you will probably be hung out to dry. Alas, I speak with authority here, I got 35 plunder points in the last game. I did not win. Comuni is very much a gamer\'s game in the European style. The system feels elegant, there are no unwelcome intrusions of blind luck, and there is little in the way of targeted negative play. The functions of the different cube currencies are well-balanced, the invasion mechanism is interesting and works well, and my four games have shown that there is more than one path to victory. All of these games have been with four players, but I can see no reason why it shouldn\'t play just as well with five. I suppose some might argue that the theme is a bit thin, but I can think of many Euro-games that are worse in that respect. Production values are excellent, apart from one inconsequential misprint on the board. A professional piece of work, and a marked improvement on Leonardo. Recommended.

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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Tenki Games | Comuni

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