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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Louis XIV

Louis XIV

Price: £22.99

RRP = £22.99

Board Game, 2-4 Players, Ages 12+ by Rio Grande Games Slip on the role of clever court attendant and try your luck in the court of Louis XIV. Influence his next decrees. Relax in his radiance on his countless cushions. Bribe ministers and buy generals. Spin intrigue and spread your net in the empire of the Sun King. Every plan is right - if it works! A careful plan and provident use of information gained in the court can help you fulfil your mission -and win the game! +++++++++++++ Counter Review +++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 90 minutes designed by Rüdiger Dorn reviewed by Stuart Dagger Stefan Brück\'s strategy of using Essen to preview what will be one of his company\'s Nuremberg releases has proved very successful, creating an advance buzz that has put the games at the top of most gamers\' Spring shopping lists. It is not, of course, without risk, as an advance buzz that declared ``rubbish\'\' before a copy had been sold would almost certainly see him being summoned to the managing director\'s office for a less than friendly chat, but so far his judgement has been sound. Alea have published one or two games that have failed to excite, but the ones selected for Essen have all been critical hits. This is the latest in the line and it doesn\'t let its predecessors down. The setting is the court of the Sun King and instead of a standard board you have twelve small ones, each 3 inches square and bearing a portrait of one of the leading courtiers. This not only makes for a smaller game box - a good thing if your shelves are as full as mine - it adds interest, because each board is double-sided, flips over at various times during the game and plays differently according to which side is currently uppermost. The idea is that the courtiers dispense favours to those who dance attendance on them. These favours take the form of tokens, ``shields\'\', cash, cards and a few technical things concerning the placement of markers. Shields are just something to collect and they convert to victory points at the end of the game. Tokens are more central. At any time you will have two ``mission cards\'\' in your hand. Each calls for a specific combination of two tokens if the mission is to be completed. Once you have them, you hand them in and place the card face up in front of you. Completed missions are worth victory points and also convey useful benefits in subsequent rounds of the game. Acquiring the right combination of tokens to complete a mission is not that difficult in practice, since you know which courtiers are handing out the ones you want and there is a plentiful supply of ``jokers\'\' which can stand in for any of the specials. It is just a matter of concentrating on the right sources. The other things on offer - cash, cards and marker placements - don\'t have an immediate victory point value but will provide valuable ammunition for the next round\'s campaign. Courting the courtiers is a matter of placing markers on to their boards, but you don\'t have free choice of target and you also need to wrestle with a logistics problem. Your markers are in two groups: a home supply and a general supply - much as you have in the Kramer/Ulrich game El Grande. Only the markers in your home supply are available for placement on to the boards, and when the boards are being cleared after the favours have been handed out, your markers will often be returned to your general supply. Among your problems, therefore, is the completion of the circle, and dealing with it takes time and resources away from what you want to be doing, which is putting markers on to the board. The mechanism for placing markers involves a set of ``influence cards\'\'. Some of these show a picture of one of the courtiers and others a pair of drawn curtains. At the start of the round you will be dealt five of them and it is possible that you may have one or two more, either as the result of gaining the favour of Cardinal Mazarin in the previous round, or as a benefit from the appropriate mission card. Each card can be used either to place markers or to recover them from your general supply and during this part of the round you will play all of them bar one, which you must then discard. So no hoarding and if someone starts with more influence cards than you, they will get more turns, to their obvious benefit. Your fault for not putting more effort into sucking up to the cardinal. The courtier boards are laid out in a pre-set pattern of diagonal adjacency - rather like the black squares on a chess board. When you play a card in order to place markers, there are two possibilities. If the card shows a portrait, you begin by taking three markers from your home supply and putting them on to the board of the courtier whose portrait is on the card. You can then either leave them all where they are, or move up to two of them to a diagonally adjacent board. If you move two, you then have the further option of moving one of them a step further. If the card you played was one with the curtains, the procedure is similar, except that you only place two markers but have a free choice of where to make the initial placement. It is a procedure that makes for interesting play, with the movement of the markers after their initial placement meaning both that the markers get spread around and that you aren\'t too restricted by the cards you were dealt. The constraints are enough to make you think but not enough to leave you feeling frustrated. When you play a card to move markers from you general to your home supply, the same ``3 and 2\'\' rule applies - three markers if you used a portrait card and 2 if a curtain one. Once everyone has used or discarded all their influence cards, the courtiers hand out their goodies, adopting one of three attitudes: haughty, venal or tarty. The haughty ones will have a `1\' printed on their boards. They will give the favour to the player who has most markers on their board. Other players get nothing, and if there is a tie for first, nobody gets the favour. The markers of the recipient, if any, are returned to general supply; those of the remainder go back home. So the freebie has, in effect, a time penalty attached, which gives everyone else a small amount of consolation. The venal courtiers are indicated by having boards which show a number of coins in place of the `1\'. They hand out the favour free to a player in undisputed first place on the board but are also willing to sell it for the price indicated to anyone who has at least one marker there. As with the previous case, a player getting the favour free loses their markers to the general supply. The others take theirs home. That just leaves the third group, whose motto is the cheery one of ``two gin and tonics and I\'m anybody\'s\'\'. Their board will show a number of markers - usually 2 and occasionally 3. They give their favour to any player who has placed at least this many markers on the board and, as a further piece of generosity, no markers are sent to general supply. After the favours have been dispensed, the boards of courtiers who handed out favours for anything other than cash are flipped over. Next round they will be offering the same things but will be adopting a different attitude to their suitors. Extra tactical chrome is provided by the king and by intrigue cards. At the start of each round a ``royal card\'\' will be flipped. This determines each player\'s income for the round and also tells you with which of the four ``inner circle\'\' courtiers the king will be staying. The significance of the latter is that there will be extra goodies available on this courtier\'s board. The intrigue cards are an extra deck of 12, one for each courtier. They are in the gift of the Minister for War and are also the reward attached to one of the mission cards. You can either keep such a card to the end of the game and cash it in for a victory point or you can play it immediately before the appropriate board is scored. This allows you to add up to two markers to the board and thereby change the destination of the favours. The game lasts four rounds, at the end of which unused material other than markers is traded in for shields. You then turn over and sort your shields into their various designs, of which there are six. The player or players who have the most of each pattern are given an extra one as a bonus. Since you have been drawing your shields blindly from a bag, there is obviously an element of chance here and some people won\'t like that. I don\'t mind. The more shields you have been drawing, the more likely you are to pick up the bonuses, and the fact that they exist means that concentrating on shields rather than solely on tokens becomes a more viable strategy. In the final count it is 5 points for each mission completed and 1 point for each shield, which is a good balance. It is likely that the winner will come from among the players tying for first place on missions, but it is also possible for someone who is one behind but has a lot of shields to nip past and claim the victory. Our games have seen both types of finish. Louis XIV is very much my sort of game. There is a lot going on, but everything has been well thought out, the mechanisms fit together nicely and there is no extraneous, time wasting clutter. The best course of action is frequently sufficiently non-obvious as to require thought, but not so much so that your opponents become conscious of the ageing process as they wait for you to make your mind up. A first rate game in other words and, it won\'t surprise you to learn, one that is also beautiful to look at.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Louis XIV

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