Alea Treasures #4: The Princes of Florence

Some time ago, an official expansion for The Princes of Florence appeared called The Princess and the Muse. It was released as a freebie PDF which you can still download from BGG. Not surprisingly, when the Treasure Chest appeared, it included this expansion in a better produced version.

I finally got a chance to play it a few weeks ago, and thus I can now offer up my fourth look at the Alea Expansions found in the Anniversary Treasure Chest.

The Princess and the Muse. In many ways, The Princess and the Muse is a pretty minimalistic expansion. It consists of just a set of six cards. After the regular auction in The Princes of Florence you then hold an auction for these six cards (essentially: roles), which can give you various advantages over the course of the round. One lets you win a future auction for free, one increases your work value, one gives you a bonus action, one lets you create a work without an artist, etc.

Effect. Medium. Despite that minimalism, these cards are a big deal. They dramatically affect your ability to make strategic plans and carry them out. Often you’ll predicate your entire turn or perhaps several turns upon having access to a certain card.

Game Design. In some ways, The Princes of Florence can be a pretty staid game. You try to maximize the return of auctions and you try and make the most clever use of actions, but there isn’t a lot of opportunity for really surprising moves. The Princess and the Muse changes that by adding some additional strategic depth to the game as well as some chaos.

For example, the Cardinal (who allows that third action) can let you get ahead in a way that opponents weren’t expecting — perhaps building something extra before creating a work. Meanwhile, the Muse (who gives +WV equal to the round) can dramatically change a player’s ability to make the best work (or maybe just to make a work good enough for the current round). In my game I was constantly figuring out how various roles could help in my current plans, and I know other players were doing the same.

I have a small complaint that the auctions in The Princess and the Muse work differently that the auctions in the main game in a way that confuses people but isn’t super important (main auctions: you always start at the minimum and increase your bid by a minimum amount; these auctions: you can bid however you want). I think there’s a lot to be said for consistency in game design increasing comprehension, and that was ignored here.

Nonetheless, I think the result is almost entirely beneficial to The Princes of Florence as it results in a more interesting and deeper game. My only caveat would be that it’s also longer and more complex. I highly recommend it for experienced players (though perhaps not for every game), but I’d recommend against it for a game with a couple or more new players.

Component Design. I haven’t talked about the component design of the various Treasure Chest supplements, but I wanted to mention this one … because it’s awful. Anyone who’s played The Princes of Florence know that it made somewhat dubious choices in its fonts. The cursive is hard to read, but since it’s mostly on player boards facing you, that’s not a big deal.

However The Princess and the Muse uses that same font on cards that are placed somewhere in the middle of the table. As a result it’s hard to read the auction numbers on the cards, so you can’t see what players have bid, except for guessing based on the relative positions of their markers. Even worse, you can’t figure out a darned thing about what the cards do because of all that cursive. (It’s hard to even read the names!) This is made worse by the lack of bold summaries or icons or anything that would make the cards easy to figure out from afar. It’s another reason why you really only want to use them with experienced players.

Addendum: Apparently the 2010 edition of The Princess of Florence includes the Princess and the Muse expansion, which is very cool of Rio Grande. I’d love to hear in the comments whether it’s the same as the Treasure Chest version or whether it improves on the usability.

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