The wealthy families are building towers across Italy—as a master builder, you can profit by working on the tallest towers.
What Is Patrician: Towers of Influence?
Patrician: Towers of Influence is an area-control game for 2 to 5 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 20 to 40 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $31 for a copy of the game. This is an updated version of the 2007 version of Patrician, which includes two optional gameplay modules as well as updated 2-player rules.
Patrician: Towers of Influence was designed by Michael Schacht and published by Calliope Games, with art by Design/Main and Andrew Hepworth.
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Patrician: Towers of Influence Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. The prototype had two game boards, but the final will have a single double-sided board. The artwork is mostly final.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Double-sided board
- 145 Tower pieces (29 each in 5 colors)
- 20 Prestige tokens (2 each in 10 colors)
- 55 Building cards
- 6 Trade Route markers
- 24 Bonus Prestige tokens
- 3 Minor Delegates cards
- 1 Major Delegates card
I was not familiar with the original edition of Patrician, but judging by the photos, this new edition looks very similar with some tweaks here and there. The cities look similar but have been moved a little so that they’re not as much on a grid, and one of the people in the portraits has been changed, though the other two still look about the same. The cover image has a new look that’s a bit more dynamic and maybe not as stuffy.
Each of the city spaces has two square building spots, a space for a card with the city name in it, two circles for the prestige tokens, and a city crest. Above the city crest is a Roman numeral that indicates the total number of tower pieces that may be placed there.
The wooden tower piecess are squares with a raised ridge (and corresponding groove) running along the center, so that they’re lined up when you stack them. Although they can slide and lean a little, you can stack them pretty high before they get dangerously wobbly—enough to get to the maximum height of 8 pieces. I guess we know why the Tower of Pisa is a little wonky now! In the original version, the number of tower piecess varied from color to color, which limited the colors you could use based on player count. This has now been adjusted so you can use any color at any player count, which is nice.
The cards are half-sized cards, and each one depicts one or two of the city crests, and possibly another feature like a portrait or a card ability.
How to Play Patrician: Towers of Influence
You can download a draft of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score the most points by controlling the tallest towers in each city.
Setup
The primary setup difference is for a 5-player game—use the side of the board that has all of the cities and all of the cards. Otherwise, use the side that does not have Pistoia (the orange city) and remove all the cards and prestige tokens that have the orange crest. (For a 2-player game, there are more details below.)
Separate out the cards that have a star in the top corner, shuffle them, and deal 3 to each player, shuffling any remaining back into the deck. Then, place one card face-up at each city. Place the prestige tokens on each city with the number sides showing. Each player takes their supply of tower pieces.
Gameplay
On your turn, you play a card from your hand into a pile in front of yourself, and then place a tower piece in the corresponding city for each crest depicted on the card. (When building two tower pieces with one card, you may put them both in the same tower space or in two different spaces.) Then, you take the card next to that city and put it in your hand, and draw a new card from the deck to refill that space.
Many of the cards have a portrait or two at the bottom—those will come into play during scoring. Ther are also two card abilities. The square with an arrow lets you move a tower piece: pick a city (other than the one on the card itself) where you have at least one tower piece. Move the top piece from one tower to the other. (This does not work in a city where the towers have already scored.) The question mark means that you may pick a card from anywhere on the board rather than the one next to the city where you just built.
Each city crest is marked with a Roman numeral (5, 7, or 9) that indicates the maximum number of tower pieces that can be built there. (It’s also the total number of crests for that city in the card deck.) As soon as the last tower piece is placed, they are scored. Whoever has the most floors in the taller tower gets the higher prestige token, and whoever has the most floors in the shorter tower gets the lower prestige token. If there’s a tie for most floors, the player who has the higher floor wins the tie. Note that if you are placing the last piece in a city and one of the building spots is still empty, you must place your piece there—every city must have two towers when it scores.
Eventually, the deck will run out and there will not be cards to refill the spaces. If you build in a city that does not have a card in front of it, you may take a card from anywhere on the board. If there are none, then you do not take a card.
Game End
The game ends when all of the cards have been played, at which point all of the towers will have been scored.
Look at all of the cards you have played and check how many of each portrait you have. For each set of three matching portraits, you score 6 points. (You do not get partial credit for incomplete sets.)
Add up all of your prestige tokens plus your portrait score, and the player with the highest score wins. If there’s a tie, it goes to the player with fewest tower pieces on the board.
2-Player Rules
The 2-player game is set up as usual, but you also use a third set of tower pieces set to the side to represent the Architetto, an automated player. The Architetto has starts with 3 cards (face-down) drawn from the top of the deck in its scoring pile.
Any time somebody plays a card with two crests, the Architetto will take a turn after that by playing the top card of the deck. There are some rules about which tower it will add to—if the towers are the same height, the current player chooses one. If they’re not the same height, the Architetto will build on the tower that gives it majority if possible, otherwise it will go on the shorter tower. Essentially it should be played in a way that gives the Architetto the most points by forcing ties if possible. Special abilities on the Architetto’s cards are ignored. The Architetto scores prestige tokens normally.
At the end of the game, reveal the Architetto’s three starting cards and place towers in those cities. The Architetto also scores portraits normally. To win, you must score higher than the other player and the Architetto.
Trade Routes Module
There are two optional modules to add a little bit more to the game. For the Trade Routes module, you’ll give everyone 1 or 2 of the trade route markers (based on player count) during setup, and set the bonus prestige tokens to the side. The trade route markers have a trader (+1 point, green) on one side and a bandit (-1 point, red) on the other.
On your turn, after playing a card with a star icon, you may place a trade route marker between two cities (there are little signpost icons on the board pointing at two cities), choosing whether to play it as a trader or a bandit. Each city may have at most two trade route tokens next to it.
When a city is scored, in addition to the regular prestige tokens, players also take bonus prestige showing +1 or -1 points for each trade route token next to that city. (If there’s one trader and one bandit, then no bonus tokens are needed since they cancel out.) At the end of the game, these bonus prestige tokens also count toward your final score.
Delegates Module
The second module is the Delegates module. Place the four delegate cards next to the board during setup, making sure the correct player count is shown on the 6-point card.
At the end of the game, the player with the most tokens shown on each of the minor delegate cards takes that card, which counts as one of the three portraits. (If there’s a tie, the player who earned the left-most token gets the card.)
The major delegate card goes to the player who scored the most total points in the three depicted cities—Ferrara, Verona, and Parma. This card counts as one of each portrait.
Why You Should Play Patrician: Towers of Influence
The theme of Patrician: Towers of Influence seems only loosely tied to the gameplay: it’s not clear what the cards represent (building contracts?), nor why building in one city allows you to build somewhere else later or even move an entire floor of a tower to a different site. And what does any of that have to do with collecting portraits? It’s really an abstract area-control game that has this Italian setting just to give it some flavor.
But that’s not a bad thing. Michael Schact has designed a lot of games (BoardGameGeek lists 268 published games!) but the one that I that I most associate with his name is Coloretto. It’s a little card game about collecting cards in various colors, makes use of an “I cut, you choose” system, and it’s really clever. The cards have chameleons on them, but there’s not really any theme, or any explanation why you gain points for a certain number of colors but lose points if you have too many. (The Zooloretto series, which came later, has a theme about building a zoo and is a bit more complex.) Patrician reminds me a little of Coloretto in that the gameplay is generally pretty simple, but figuring out how to win is a little trickier.
On your turn, you only have three cards to choose from, so your options are limited (especially if some of those cards are for the same city). Within each city, there are only two spaces to build, and early in the game if the city is empty then there’s no difference between them. Finally, unless you have the card that lets you pick up a card from anywhere, the card you play will also determine which new card you’ll get. It narrows down the decision space a little.
Sometimes you may play a card simply because of what card you’ll get to pick up. If you’re really hoping to control Verona and you see the double blue-crest card is available, then that’s a good tactic—as long as you have the right card to claim it. Or, perhaps you’re looking to complete a particular portrait collection and you see a couple of cards that have the matching portrait. Finally, it may be that you can gain control of a tower with the right placement.
Of course, tower control is hard to guarantee until the last floor is placed in a city. Up until then, there’s always a chance that you could get outnumbered on a tower you control, or that somebody might move floors around to change the balance of power. It’s easier to dominate the smaller cities, but they aren’t worth as many points. Is it worth collecting a lot of pink crest cards for Firenze because the towers there are worth 9 and 6 points? Maybe, but investing that heavily in one city means you’re probably missing out on a lot of other places. Building later is generally better because it gives you the advantage if there’s a tie. There were times where I played a card in a city where I knew I didn’t have a chance to win so that I could delay building in a city where I thought it might be a close contest.
There is a good amount of luck involved, too—sometimes you’ll see cards that you want, and there’s simply no way to get them with the cards you have in your hand. You could try to chain them—if I play green, then I can pick up that yellow, which will let me pick up the brown, which is the card I really want—but chances are that chain won’t stay in place long enough for you to complete it. Near the end of the game, when the cards have been depleted, it can also feel like some of your choices are forced and you can’t make a huge difference anymore, but just have to play out the rest of your hand.
The modules are an interesting addition. They also don’t add too much complexity to the rules, but give you more to consider in your decisions. The trade routes can only be played when you’ve placed a star card—you start with 3 of them and there might be a few more in the deck but you’re not guaranteed to get more. So the trade routes might get played pretty early, unless somebody holds onto a starting card for a while, affecting the value of those cities. If you put bandits on a city—as one player did right at the start—but then you end up getting more cards for that city, you may regret it! Similarly, boosting the value of a city with trade routes because you have a good start there might just increase the competition for those cards.
The delegates module is very easy to include—you just award the cards to the people who scored the most of the designated prestige tokens, and they get more portraits for their collections. They boost the value of the shorter towers as well as the least valuable cities—but even then it’s not a guaranteed boost. If it happens to complete a set of portraits, that card could be worth 6 points to you, which is substantial. But if it turns out it’s just an extra portrait, then it’s worthless. I like the way this one just adds a small wrinkle: the points awarded can be enough to swing the game in somebody’s favor, but it can still be a bit of a gamble.
The fun of Patrician: Towers of Influence is probably mostly because it’s oddly satisfying to stack things up. Claiming the advantage on a tower from somebody else by adding your pieces on top, moving a floor that another player was counting on—those are the memorable moments in the game. Also, I like that the outcome is never completely known (unless you’re a card-counter), because even though the prestige tokens are visible, everyone’s portrait collections are hidden in their stacks of cards until the end. I did feel sometimes like I wasn’t entirely in control, that my choices were extremely limited by the cards I had in hand, but overall I still enjoyed playing it and trying to do the best with what I’d been dealt.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Patrician: Towers of Influence Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.
