OUR REVIEW

Power Play between France and England

Richelieu

SUpport Richelieu or promote the Grey Eminence

France in the 17th century. On one side of the conflict King Louis XIII. And Cardinal Richelieu fight for remaining in power, confronted by all of England, the Hapsburgs and the French nobility. If you were someone at that time, you were forced to side with someone. This goes for the players in Richelieu, the game from White Goblins. And only if you support the "right" side you will be winning! Unfortunately, you will only now at the end of the respective power skirmishes if you have supported the "right", winning, side or will be left empty-handed after all. And if you are a real turncoat, you will enjoy of changing sides permanently, the trend is to go with the majority.

The main mechanism in Richelieu is the play for majorities. Players repeatedly choose one of the two rivalling powers and as soon as a scoring is triggered the players who put their trust in the more powerful side will win. The influencing of power structures is done by the players by placing agents onto the board. At any given time there are three power skirmishes available on the board, where you can place agents.

This board is the central element in the game on which all of the events do happen. It features the three areas already mentioned, where the balance of power between England and France are designed. Those areas are called intrigue boxes and are filled by players with agents in the course of the game. Those intrigue boxes are first covered with intrigue sheets - there are 13 of them supporting the Richelieu faction, and another 13 ones which can be grabbed by England, the French nobility, Protestants or Hapsburgs. The sheets can be distinguished by their coat-of-arms and their background colors. Each intrigue sheet provides five spots for placing agents, a bonus for the player who contributed most to the winning of the skirmish with his agents, another bonus for the player in second place and an information on how Cardinal Richelieu will advance on the game board.

Three different counting tracks are printed onto the board; one is used for marking the amount of your own income, one for your own military power and, finally, the obligatory prestige track - yes, in Richelieu, too, we are working or playing for Prestige, which decides the outcome of the game. This prestige track also features the starting position for Cardinal Richelieu, the red pawn in the game. The other two pawns in the game, a grey one, yes, really and incredibly grey, for the Grey Eminence or Eminence Grise and a pink one for the Queen have their given starting position on the board, which they take up, too, or - to stay in the diction of the game, even if it seems something of an exaggeration for a colored ellipse - they are in their palace.  

The board is completed by two deposit areas, one for already scored agents and the other for jewelry markers, and a scoring track for the final scoring at the end of the game.

The tools for players in this game are their agents. Those agents are kept hidden and secret behind a screen. Each player commands ten agents in the guise of ten discs in his color, all with a distinct and different value of -2, 1, 2 or 3. At the start of the game each player has all his agents behind his screen.

Unfortunately those agents of yours do not work for free! In order to dispatch them to an intrigue skirmish the want to be and need to be paid. Fortunately you have always a bit of loose change in your pockets, either in the guise of gold coins, Louis d’Or of value 3, or as silver coins, Louis d’Argent, of value 1. At the start of the game each player owns coins of a total value of 7. Now and again it can happen that there is not enough money - sending out agents permanently on missions is rather expensive! Fortunately, you own a bit of jewelry that can be huckstered. Each player begins the game with two jewelry markers and two more jewelry markers are placed on the deposit area on the board. Jewelry can be converted into money in a separate, distinct action.

To round off the overview on components, I need to mention the three marker pieces for each player for use on the respective marking tracks and also one prestige tile 30+ for each player, as the track for prestige ends with value thirty and who wants to be left with that low amount of prestige? The markers, by the way, are placed at the start of the game on Zero on the tracks for prestige and military and on position One for income.

Cardinal Richelieu has, of course, an important role and function in this game. His pawn wanders to and fro on the prestige track and decides for a player if he may do one or two actions in his turn. At the start of the game Cardinal Richelieu is taking up position Seven on the track. Should the marker of a player be behind the Cardinal pawn on the prestige track, that is, on a lower position, the owner of the marker is allowed tow action. In case of a tie or when the marker is in front of the Cardinal, a player is allowed only one action in his turn. This mechanism gives an advantage to those player lagging behind the leading players in prestige.

Beginning with the starting players and continuing in clockwise direction, all players have a turn and choose their one or two actions from four different options: Place agents, cash income, buy a Commission or trade jewelry.

To place agents is the most important choice of actions and also the only one that can be chosen twice in a turn, provided that the active player has two actions at his disposal. When a player chooses this action, he takes an agent of his choice from behind his screen and places him on a free spot on any of the intrigue sheets on the board. Each intrigue sheet provides five spots at different costs for each spot.    The position to the left is the most expensive position and costs three silver coins. The following positions have costs of 2-1-1-0 silver coins. On those spots that do cost coins agents are placed face-down, one agent is allowed in each position. On the spots that are free of cost you must place your agent face-up. If you want to place a second agent in your turn you pay two additional silver coins for this agent.

In each action a player can decide freely and independently from other actions where to place an agent. In this way the six intrigue sheets in the three intrigue boxes on the board are filled slowly with agents. When a player puts an agent on the last available spot on an intrigue sheet the respective intrigue box is scored.

For scoring an intrigue all agents on both sheets are turned over and their value is revealed. Values of all agents on each sheet are added and the results are compared. The sheet with a higher total from agents has won the skirmish; in case of a tie the skirmish is always won by the sheet of Cardinal Richelieu. Then the winning sheet is scored for players. The player who contributed most points to the win scores the bonus for the first place, the placer with the second-biggest contributes, if there is such a player - takes the bonus for second place. Then Cardinal Richelieu moves on the prestige track: If the sheet of the Cardinal won the intrigue he moves forward on the track, if his sheet lost the intrigue he moves backwards on the track, the number of steps he moves is noted on the sheet. Should the point comparison end in a tie of two players, the agent in the left-most position decides who wins the player scoring. Finally, the player in first place is given the winning intrigue sheet. The number of intrigue sheets acquired during the game is scored at the end of the game.

Intrigue sheets of losing parties are taken out of the game. All agents from both sheets are placed open-faced on the deposit area for agents on the board. Then the intrigue box is filled again with two new intrigue sheets, one from the Richelieu faction, and one from the opposing factions.

When a player puts his last agents from stock behind the screen onto the board, he takes back all his agents from the deposit area and puts them behind his screen. If this event occurs simultaneously with the scoring of an intrigue sheet he takes his agents back before the scoring.

The bonus on the intrigue sheet can come in different guises. Usually it is a combination of victory points and another bonus, which can be money, or advancement on the military track or advancement on the income track or the chance to make use of other characters. Those characters include the Queen or the Eminence Grise. Both pawns come into play exclusively via those bonuses. A player who receives the bonus can, depending on the symbol, either put the queen on a free spot on the intrigue sheet of Cardinal Richelieu or the Eminence Grise on a free spot on the sheet of Richelieu's opponents. When an intrigue is scored those persons are worth 3 points, but do not count towards a player, but only for the scoring of the sheet. After the scoring those pawns go back to their palaces, unless another bonus makes them wander off to another intrigue sheet.

Finally, there are two bonuses relating to agents: One of them allows a player to immediately relocate one of his agents; the other enables you to relocate another player's agent on an intrigue sheet.

Another very important possibility for an action is to cash income. According to the position of your marker on the income track you receive between one and five silver coins. The marker itself can only be advanced to a better position by a corresponding bonus on an intrigue sheet or by advancing on the military track.

The action of buying a commission is very valuable, especially at the start of the game, it is equal to advancement on the military track. On top of this, the movement onto certain positions on the military track gives you an additional bonus, for instance advancing the marker on the income track by one position or getting an additional prestige point. However, the advancement on the military track becomes exponentially more expensive. You pay the costs for the spot on which you will advance, and there is also a serious restriction for this action: You can only use this actions when your marker on the prestige track is behind the pawn of Cardinal Richelieu! To reach the highest position, 10, is therefore probably rather illusory.

As a final choice of action a player may sell one of his own jewelry pieces for a price of 5 silver coins or buy a piece of jewelry from the deposit area on the board. This costs, however, eight silver coins and can of course be only used if there is a piece of jewelry available on the deposit area. The sense of such an action lies in the fact that each single piece of jewelry is worth four prestige points at the end of the game.

In this way all 13 pairs of intrigue sheets are played, then the game ends and a final scoring is done.

In this final scoring each player scores bonus points for all the intrigue sheets that he collected. For the factions opposing Cardinal Richelieu you look at the number of sheets in one color - you score one bonus point for one sheet of a color and can score up to nine points for all three sheets of a color and up to 16 points for all four sheets in case of England. The intrigue sheets of the Richelieu faction are scored differently: You look at majorities in relation to other players. If you own most Richelieu sheets you score eight points, for second place you score four points; in case of a tie twelve points are shared. You advance on the prestige point track for the bonuses that you scored. Then you are awarded the number of prestige points according to your position on the income track on on the military track and mark them on the prestige point track. And finally, you advance your marker on the prestige point track by four positions for each piece of jewelry that you own. If you are now on first place on the prestige point track, you have won.

Richelieu is a game on majorities only. If you like that kind of game, you will like Richelieu, too. The system of bonus points for intrigue sheets of the same color strategic components are provided. Our rest games have, however, shown that a strategy is very hard to follow, because the game is much too interactive for that. Even the information provided by open-faced agents of other players on the deposit area only allows suppositions but no unequivocal conclusions about opposing agents on the intrigue sheets. Seen from the point of an expert player Richelieu will probably provide only short-time entertainment. The game offers no different opportunities for trying different tactics or strategies for winning and also flows rather monotonously during a game. The 13 pairs of intrigue sheets are played out one after the other, and play for each pair is the same. So the game is not very varied and the scoring of a pair of intrigue sheets at the end of an intrigue rarely provides reason to be surprised, because usually you know in advance who will win, as it rarely makes sense to place an agent on an opposing sheet as soon as one of two boards is chosen.

An interesting feature would have been the mechanism that determines the number of available actions in a turn. However, this regulation mechanism to support lagging players only works conditionally, insofar as in the latter part of the game Richelieu usually is so far back on the Prestige track that no player is behind him. But if a player happens to be behind Richelieu, this gives him a clear advantage, albeit only a short-time one, because should a player manage to win an intrigue sheet due to this advantage he usually wins more prestige points than Richelieu and overtakes him in most cases.

As a positive aspect must be noted that Richelieu is easy to learn. The rules are short and concise and very clear and allow quick access to the game. All in all the game can be recommended mainly to friends. Due to the strategic components and also the important aspect of assessing other players adults might have advantages over children, but all the same the game could also be played by families.

Bernhard Czermak

Players:

Age: 10+

Time: 60+

Designer: Olivier Lamontagne

Artist: Marco Morte

Price: ca. 32 Euro

Publisher: White Goblin Games 2012

Web: www.whitegoblingames.com

Genre: Majorities

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: de en fr it nl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Simple rules

Well-arranged components

High interaction

Compares to:

Jerusalem, Abacusspiele

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 4

Bernhard Czermak:

The game convinces with its simple rules and speedy flow, but offers few variations and is rather monotonous. The allure is in the correct assessment or guessing at actions of other players.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0