Patrician

We recently acquired a copy of Patrician from Mayfair games. Like every other Mayfair game I have played, the construction quality is excellent. The game plays with two to five players and lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. It lists for ages 10 and up, but our eight-year old had no problems playing it.

The theme of the game is that you are a builder in Italy during the Middle Ages, and you want to the most successful builder in the entire country. Each turn, you take one of your wooden tiles and place it on a building site in one of the cities based on the card you play from your hand. If you play a brown card, you can play a tile on the brown city. The tiles stack up to form towers, and there are two tower sites in each city. Each city has a maximum number of floors that can be built, and when that number is reached, the city is scored. The person with the most number of floors in a building gets the points for it with the points being determined by the size of the city and the size of the tower. The game ends when all the possible towers have been completed or all the cards are played. You've not only gained points for building towers (hopefully), but you also score points based on icons on the cards you've played. The more sets of patricians you have made, the more points you get. In this way, there are two ways to score lots of points and win the game.

Overall, I believe the game is based on equal parts luck and strategy. Luck comes in because you cannot build on cities you do not get cards for. Strategy comes in because you cannot build on cities you do not get cards for. I found myself building in cities to either improve my position in them or because I wanted to get the card on that city by placing a tile there. I want to try a couple times just playing for the patrician icons on the cards to see if it is possible to win that way. I definitely give it thumbs up, especially for bridging the gap for young players into new games.