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access to one of the three principals, enabling you to get a bonus action by piggy-backing on another player’s visit to one of them. The cardinal is the head of the church in Portugal, and the church still wields considerable power, despite the prime minister’s efforts to clip its wings. In the game, “meeting the cardi- nal” means moving your piece round a small track in the center of the board. This track contains “clergy tiles”, and you will gain one of them as a result of your move. The immediate effect is to give you a useful benefit. Later, you will have the opportunity to surrender the tile (and the attendant benefit) in return for influence and victory points. However, this surren- der can only be done at certain points in the game, and the end isn’t one of them, so you need to exercise judgment on how long to retain each tile, a decision made trickier by the fact that there is a limit on how many of these tiles that you can hold at any one time.
Play is centered on a set of political cards, which are split
into four decks, one
for each of the three
nobles and one of
“treasury cards”. You
have a hand of five,
and on each turn you play a card, take one of the actions it offers you and draw a replacement from the deck of your choice. The top card of each deck is face-up and so you are not drawing blindly. This is a game where you have enough control to be able to plan ahead.
There are four main actions. With the first you play a card to your personal board, from where it will provide both an immediate benefit and a continu-
ing one. Then you sell goods. This involves ships, and you are not restricted to using your own. The
money raised will, of course, come
to you, but there are also victory
points and these go to the owner
of the ship or ships that you use. The reason for sometimes using other players’ ships is that you might not have enough hold space on your own.
The second main action is to “trade with nobles”. This, like the first action, begins with the play of a card to your per- sonal board. You can then take up to two state actions. The only drawback here to what initially sounds like a great deal is
that “trade with” means “bribe”. The nobles whose actions you utilize require payment in the form of goods. There are four types of good – gold, books, cloth and tools – and each noble will only accept two of them. They all like gold, but the other passion of the prime minister, who is a man of the Enlightenment, is books, while the king, who has a large wardrobe to maintain, wants cloth.
I Fairly straightforward
With the other two actions you play a card not to your personal board, but to the central one, and this time the action you take will depend on the type of card you play. All the treasury cards have an illustration showing an action, and if you play one of these, you pay money and take that action. With the noble cards you are considered to be visiting the noble whose portrait is
shown on the card. Your
reward will be to use his
noble action and,
optionally, one of his
state ones. Payment this
time is in the form of
influence. These visits are also the point at which other players can use their royal favors to join you.
One more thing about the play that I need to mention is rubble. The disasters that hit the city resulted in lots of it, some from the earthquake, some from the flood and some from the fire. It needed to be cleared and, if pos-
sible, re-used. You will acquire it when you build shops and public buildings, and you will be looking to collect sets of it – a set being one of each of the three types. Sets score victory points and also provide in-game benefits. The more sets you have, the more goods you can store in your warehouses and the more cards
you can have on your personal board. They also gain you more
decrees. The specifics
are a bit artificial here.
I am sure that in 1755
rubble was just rubble, and people didn’t collect sets of different types, but as a game mechanism it works well, and the story would have been lacking had rubble not featured somewhere.
What makes Lisboa a game at the upper end of the complexity range is not its main structure. As you can see, that is fairly straightforward. On your turn you play a single card into one of two places, and each of those placements then gives you one of two options. It is the detail in the subsystems and the amount of infor- mation you have to absorb that will restrict its appeal to those who like heavy- weight games. I have referred in passing to things like influence, the scoring asso- ciated with the clergy tiles and their track, the different types of good produced by the stores, and so on. The rule book explains everything very clearly, but it
runs to 24 pages. Then there is the player aid. Instead of the small sheet of card that is so welcome in many games, you are given an 8-page booklet. Admittedly,
a significant chunk of this is taken up with listing and explaining all the clergy tiles and decree cards, of which there are a lot, but there is also a longish list of icons and detailed guides through
the steps that make up the various actions. It is all good stuff and well set out, but there is a lot of it. So much, that with both my groups, we agreed at the start of the first game that we’d have to treat the evening as a learning exercise. Even with that agreement, they weren’t sure at the end whether they had enjoyed it or whether it was just too much like work. However, we persisted and the second games
went much better. By the
end of the third game they had decided that not only did they like
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