 the princes of Florence, which is not traders of Genoa, but it's pretty much even odds. If you bring up either one of those games in my presence, I'll assume you're talking about the other one until I see the game and remember, right? So traitors of Genoa is the game where you can trade anything for anything. Yep. Prince of the Florence is actually just normal Euro game. Yep. Well, not a lot of trading. It's a normal like older Euro game. Yeah, because it's not a real Euro game. It's not a cube pushing game. No, El Grande, which is even older, but it's also not one of the more modern like crank the machine games. It's one of those like really tight Euro E like multiple paths to victory. Every turn you get a couple actions. There's like bidding and stuff. Have a really restrictive bidding system of some kind. Yeah. Well, you go, I think it's like a power grid kind of thing, right? We go around, right? Like one, two, three. Yeah. But it's not power grid in that the bidding is fixed. You start at 200, you go up in 100 increments. Right. But yeah, Prince. So the Prince of Florence is a game from 2000. So it's 16 years old, but it's an old son. It's a Kramer and Ulrich game, which you may remember from El Grande, which really holds up as I'm starting to realize as I see people talking about it and playing it again in the modern era. So this game is from the line of games that were some of our earliest German Euro style. Yeah, I'm not sure what these games had to do with each other. Other than that, they all came in the same box and had numbers on them. And it was like, yeah, the Elliott, it was the big box games, a big box like Puerto Rico and a bunch of games all come in the same looking box. You'd see these all lined up a game company. Like it like you go to millennium games. It was one with the mammoths on it. I think Burgundy's actually in that list. I don't know about that. Maybe. I don't know, but I don't think there's other. There's also the small box. Right. But basically all these games castles of Burgundy, all these games come in the same looking box with the same style in Germany. They're all numbered, but you'll know them in the US because a lot of them were brought out by Rio Grande in the US without the numbers. You can tell by looking at them, you're supposed to line them up on your bookshelf. But what these games have to do with each other, other than that, they are similarly complex Euro games. I don't know. Yeah, like they're not made by the same people. What's interesting though is many of them, but not all of them. And also I have not played all of them. Some of them have never as far as I know, been released in the US. Not all of them are equally good. It's not so they range from bad to Puerto Rico. So but all these like Kramer and all rich games and all these bit like there's all these games in this that I all associate together. But part of that was that when I got into gaming, a lot of these games were in game stores and they were the games that I was playing because other people were playing them. Yeah. Even in the early 2000s, this was out in the US. Didn't he do what to call because that was a series of games that weren't actually I don't think Wolfgang Kramer made to call. Yeah. Did he? Yeah, he totally did. Okay. He did to call in those other games that were the the set of three Maya to call and Java. Did he make those other ones called the mask trilogy? Okay. And Mexico Java to call. Right. Did he make Java in Mexico also? That's just a picture. Anyway, whatever. So the Prince of Florence. So in this game, the idea, alternate names, the increasingly inaccurately named mask trilogy. Anyway, so the you got your all princes in Florence, right? And you have domains, right? You know, you got little, I guess, what would you call my house? Yeah, you got houses, the place where you live, your estate, right? And there's awesome people in Florence because hell, it's fucking Florence, right? And you want to attract these awesome people to come and live in residence on your estate, because then you'll be more awesome than them other princes like rim. Yeah. Right. So pretty much whoever gets the most people living with them, right, is the winner. And that's all the game is. So all you do on your turn is you basically can choose certain actions to try to improve your estate. For example, you can add new buildings to your state, right? Like if if I have a nice art studio, then all the artists are going to want to come and stay with me, right? Well, rim with his shabby estate. They don't want to go there. You can introduce a freedom to your people, right? If the people who live on my estate, right? Like it's it's feudalism, right? Effectively, not feudalism. It's feudalism, so not feudalism. I give my people who live on my estate. Beyond feudalism. I'm a prince. I'm basically the king, right? There isn't a king telling me what to do. And people on my estate follow my rules. And if I don't give them freedom of speech, then they got to shut the fuck up. But if I decide, you know what? I want to give the people who live on my estate freedom of speech, unlike that heathen fascist rim estate where everyone has to shut up all the time. People are going to want to come and stay on my estate, aren't they? I think they are because it's a nicer estate than rims estate. So basically you got to alternate between improving your estate and then actually getting people to live there. Now the actual game, like what do you actually do if you ignore the conceit of the game? That's one area where a lot of the games that are kind of similar in that it's a bunch of semi unique or very constraining mechanics kind of all cobbled together into a system. And you're just trying to navigate through the system alongside everyone else. It's it's sort of like solitaire, except that you interact one because you are acquiring highly limited resources and two, the primary way you get the most limited resources is through a very restrictive auction. So basically on your turn, there'd be an auction. So you put something up for auction for like 200 florid, and then you just go clockwise around the table. You either pass forever or increase the bid by exactly 100 florid. So the things that you auction off, there's only so many turns. You do not play this game. You play like seven turns and then it's over. So basically you're going to win seven auctions and take 14 actions to actions per turn. That's it. That's the whole game. And you got to play, you know, you're only only once per turn. Can you actually get a person to move into your place? So if you want to win, I won. I had six guys move into my place. So on the seven turns available in the game, six of them, I was able to score a dude and have him move into my estate. You could theoretically make two, but I don't know if I've ever seen anyone do it. I did one a turn, except for, I think, the second turn. Yeah, there's definitely a turn. I did not do one. And so did the person who came in second place. Yeah. Everyone else did five or fewer. So the game is good in that there aren't really other games like it, and it is interesting, but there seems to be a big point of contention among players as to whether or not the five player, playing the game with five players is the best option as opposed to four. It's definitely is one of those games where it is very different with different numbers of players because it has the old game problem of they did not scale up the numbers of things a lot as players numbers changes. Yup. So as you have more players, resources become more scarce and it changes the game drastically. Well, like three player, four player, five player Puerto Rico, completely different games, right? But compared to say power grid where when you have more players in power grid, you put up more starting resources so they don't run out and you use bigger maps that you don't fight. You know, you're equally, you have as much fighting over space no matter how many players there are. Yup. So with a five player game, the dudes to make the things, which is like the primary point economy of the game, there are not that many of them and you need them. Right. You might make an awesome mistake, but if you can't actually get the guys cards of dudes in your hand, you know enough, I actually had to fight very hard at the end of the game to get one more card so I could actually score, have a final dude to score on the last turn. When we played at PAX, what we saw is that the cards that were available were all taken up basically immediately. And then as a result, the only way you could ever get another person outside of what was already in your hand was to, there's a card that lets you basically take a guy that was already played by someone else instead and convince him to come to your estate and leave. So I convinced the guy to leave rims estate and come to my estate instead to score him even though you'd already been scored. So when you score the guys, and this is actually a very interesting mechanic, when you get these guys, basically they have sort of requirements or not really requirements. They got preferences, right? The art, you know, if a guy has a certain job, he likes a certain kind of estate, right? If you have an artist studio, the guy who's like a philosopher doesn't give a fuck. He's like, what use is that to me? But if you've got a library, he's like, oh baby. Yup. I like that estate. Bigger buildings have more people who like them. So they're like the tiny building. There's only one dude who cares about that place. Yeah, if you get like the observatory, only the astronomer gives a shit. Everyone else is like, I don't care if you're having a freaking telescope. And then all these other things like landscapes and gestures and all this stuff, they like add more points to this. So basically when you take a dude, right? So it's like, if I could go to that place as a library, but this place as a library, but it also has three gestures. It's like, whoa, that place is way more fun. I definitely want to go there and everyone loves gestures. So when you take a dude, you basically add up all those factors and you get a number of how valuable that work was. And every turn there is a minimum value that even counts. You can't even do it unless you get at least to the minimum, right? So it's going up. People get more and more demanding as the quality of estates increases. People like, you know, they got higher standards, right? It's like at the beginning of the game, all the estates are basically empty. So it's like, I'll move in anywhere. There's a fucking bed. And you bring in, you bring the guy in and he scribbles like on a piece of paper and everyone in town is like, Oh my God, that's amazing. Right. But seven turns later, they're like, what? I've already seen the Mona Lisa. Right. Yeah. For me. Yeah. Towards the end of the game, it's like, you know, if you want me to live in your estate and, you know, make you some works or whatever. I mean, you better have like fucking, you know, people made of gold licking my junk because that's what I got now. So, you know, yep. So when you complete the work and everyone might complete their works on the turn, you get a bonus for making the highest value work, but you pretty much just got a complete one because that's the primary way to get money and victory points. And basically when you complete the work, when you do the thing and get the person, you choose how much of that you want to turn into victory points and how much of that you want to turn into money to basically continue playing the game. And this is the most interesting decision in the game. It is not an easy decision. No, it's like you score a guy. I got fucked by like 100 Florian more than once. Right. It's like you think, okay, early in the game, you take the coins and late in the game, you take, just take all victory points. And that's not a bad way to go. That's the way it works in most games. But on the second to last turn of the game, I realized, aha, next turn, I need to score another dude or else I'm not going to win. Yep. If I want to score another dude, I need to win this auction to buy that dude to score. Otherwise, I'm going to basically score zero points in the final turn for nothing. So even though I could score this guy for full victory points, that's not enough points to win. But if I score him now for zero points and take all money and I use all that money and get a guy next turn, I win like the important option. No, that's still not enough points to win because I scored zero points this turn. I got to somehow get enough points this turn, but as much money as possible so that I have enough points to basically make it so no one can beat me, but also have enough money so I can win the auction next turn no matter what. Now, independent of that, pretty much everything you do gets you some points at the end of the game. And there's all these like sub games that are kind of solitary that you just play, right? Like gestures get you points and buildings get you like, yeah, there's all these things that like add value to the works that you get with the people, but there's also things like when you get buildings or these landscape things, you put them on your board and you got to play Tetris and there's rules like you can't build buildings next to other buildings and unless your builder gets really good and you want to have the least empty space at the end of the game because you have bonus points for that and if you need a building but it won't fit, well fuck you, that sucks. Yep. And on top of all that you have set collections so like if you get enough builders or you get enough forests or whatever, you get all these extra victory points. So there's a lot of ways to get victory points at the end of the game. So it's, you know, a lot of these games in this era had that concept of everything is worth victory points in some direct way. And then there's a machine that also cranks out victory points. So you got to optimize the like placement, getting of things while also optimizing the machine. The machine tends to be more reliant upon the actions of the other players while the rest of it tends to be more solitary. Right. The machine is definitely the most powerful way to get the victory points. Like if you win that, you win because if you win it, other people aren't getting points because that's the competitive part, but you have to keep up in the solitary part. Otherwise, it won't be enough points to win, but it's like if you just keep up in the solitary and win the machine game, then you're going to win the whole game. So I'm not sure if I believe the five player version of this game is the best or not. I think the problem with, it's tough, right? It's so tight and so locked in on the cards that a problem is that unless you've played the game enough to just know like which guys need what and kind of a sense of what all the buildings are, you have a little bit of analysis problems and you have to literally look at the list of all the people and all the things those people want and look at everyone else's boards and you can do a lot of calculations. It took me a lot of time, but I won. Right. I did do a bit of analysis. I took like, I took a few minutes to figure out which, what exactly what I was going to do. I was unwilling to do that and I went up and got a hot dog instead and as a result I had a really bad turn. I only did it once at like the very end of the game because my plan was slightly disrupted that I had originally come up with because someone else did something. So I basically had to spend an extra like two minutes figuring out what the hell was going to do and it did it. So the problem I had too was that in the last turn, I think there were two players in our five player game who had literally nothing they could do in the last turn to get points enough to matter. Yep. And a third player may or may not have been able to affect the game, but it really didn't matter because it depended upon what the fourth and fifth players did. So because the resources had basically run out on that fifth turn. So you could only do something if you were large and in charge in the fifth turn. If you played with less players, there would still be a bunch of unclaimed resources at that point and it wouldn't be so tight that you know you could anyone would still be in it basically. But at the same time, the tightness adds a ridiculous amount of tension without the game going on as long as some of those super tense strength like you want games to be tight. We don't want to be too tight. For example, we did potion explosion. We talked about recently and a potion explosion. You can only score two potions to turn and if you fall behind, you don't score to every turn. Well, right. But in, uh, in Princess of the Florence, it's like, well, you want to score one dude on almost every turn. And if you fall behind and you can't really score more than one and that's sort of like, but it sucks because sometimes you can't even get a guy because they ran out and that's that's why I had to win that option on the final turn. What's interesting though is the game is only seven turns. So, uh, I enjoy the like severe restrictions and tightness of this game, even though I hate the same thing in, uh, Food Chain Magnate. Well, I think it's because even Food Chain Magnate is a lot longer and the paths are so narrow and they don't touch each other at all. This game, every path has a lot of victory points and a lot of ways to turn 90 degrees and sort of thread your way through the game and you can really look at what other people are doing and it matters a lot. Well, the game just has lots of decisions to make that are really interesting. Like do I, how do I split this between victory points and money, which I want to buy that building because that lets me make this guy. He'll, he'll be attracted to my estate, but the building doesn't really fit nicely in my area. So do I try to get a builder first, but if I get a builder first and it's a whole action, I won't be able to get this freedom and if I, right, because I only have two actions and I don't get the freedom, the guy won't be as happy. Oh, I already have a builder. Getting another one doesn't help me that much, but I can just get victory points for that and a bunch of builders is victory points. Yep. It's like, there's a lot of decisions like that that are like, you know, and then once you make one, you're locked in, you know, you basically, you improved your board for now the whole rest of the game. So it's like the buildings I chose early and like the early turns, I didn't realize when I was buying those buildings that later in the game, it's like, Oh, I need the guys that goes with those buildings so that I can get more value out of that building purchase. If I have to buy a new building, that, you know, if I had to get a different guy and to get a different building, that's a whole extra action to buy another building and like a whole another, right, where so I can be more efficient and use them over and over again, then I'll get more value for my action because you're seven turns, two actions a turn was at 14 actions the end, right? 14 actions and seven auctions, right? That's all you got. So you better choose those 14 21 things very, very wisely. So we knew, you know, we're talking about the tense decisions. The first auction of the game, we're all sitting there about to play this game and a bunch of us haven't played it before. And even the literal first auction in the game was real tense and got to a real high number. Yes, like there's only going to be seven of them. Here you go. First one, let's go. It's like, oh, shit. Yep. And because the auctions are restricted, it's not like auctions in other games where you can drive it up strategically. You, because you really don't have a lot of choice. It's just the price will be X when it comes to you. Right. In power grid, there's like this three of them and, you know, there's going to be more and it's okay. Yeah. And this one, it's like, all right, I'm picking Jester. And it's like, well, that's the Jester that could be won this turn. Yep. If you don't get another Jester, if you don't win this auction for Jester this turn, you are at best getting a Jester next turn, which is a big difference. Yep. Because every turn things are a lot of the things you get are effectively cumulative. So getting a Jester on turn one way more valuable than getting it on turn two and extra. It's it's significantly, but not drastically more valuable than turn two, but it's way more valuable than getting one on turn three. Yeah. And you're playing with four or five people in a seven turn game. Turn three is halfway through the game basically. Yep. It's like, oh, I got one at the start of the game and you got one halfway through. Good job. That's like two less uses you got out of it. So I feel like this is a style of Euro that a lot of you may not have played. Yeah. Because I feel like this is the stuff I think most people haven't been playing Euro series games as long as we have, even though we haven't been playing it as long as like Gragnard's. We've only been playing since 2000 ish, right? And this is probably got sellers in 2000. Right. So this came out in like 2000. So yeah. So I don't I like it. I don't know if I want to own it because I'm trying to get rid of games. I don't think I need to own this game, but it's like I want to play and he should bring it to another packs. Right. So if I want to play a for real Euro game that I haven't already played a bunch, I would play this a few more times watching us in the stream. He's pointing out. Yeah, he's right. So yeah, because Kramer worked with Keesling on those other games and with Ulrich on this stuff. Okay. Anyway, well to do there's two different oraches, but the third one is not always named. I don't know. I don't know why. I never know. I have not paid a lot of attention to these people. I don't know a lot about Richard Ulrich, to be perfectly honest. I know Wolfgang Kramer because his name was on all the games I played a long time ago. Maybe I should bring El Grande to Pax East. Do whatever you want. I think I'm bringing it. I want to go home. You want to go home? Oh yeah, the caps game starts in a half hour. Whatever. This has been Geeknights with Rym and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember, Geeknights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geeknights is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Geeknights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.