Page 36 - spielbox 03/21 - English

Review. Praga Caput Regni
Blow After Blow in Prague
Designer Vladimír Suchy founded Delicious Games in 2018 to publish his new games. He had already produced some notable games via Czech Games Edition, including
Shipyard, Last Will and 20th Century, so had a very good gaming pedigree as far as I was concerned. Underwater Cities was the first game launched
from the new company and it confirmed his continued status as an excellent designer. There were one or two minor production issues with the game (fixed
with a later expansion) but the launch of a new seemingly complex city building game called Praga Caput Regni stirred my gaming imagination.
By ALAN HOW
The setting is the city of Prague, with players acting as wealthy cit- izens who wish to impress the King with their range of activities. There’s a lot going on in this game with many moving parts and part of the incentive for the players is to work out how to manipulate each element and in what sequence.
Players have their own board which is used to record the level of mining produc- tion in gold and stone, which you need in order to erect buildings and roads. Other wheels record your stock of these
commodities. But it would be too
simple to have straightforward tracks, so in addition there are bonuses to gath- er when gold or stone is collected and these are cumulative, so you have more decisions about which commodity to progress; meanwhile the storage cranes provide bonuses when you reach specific levels in stock, which may mean saving them up rather than spending as you go.
Each player has their own action board as well which is the basis of where you will add new walls when you build them.
During a turn, players select one of six available action tiles from a wheel of actions. Each tile is a double hexagon and you select one of these two actions as your turn, ignoring the other. In ad- dition to the action, the location of the
tile provides a bonus and there may be a supplementary bonus or cost depending on where the action tile was selected. The wheel is then rotated one position and the tile that you used is returned to the cost section of the wheel, meaning that this tile is more expensive to select for the next player. There are two aspects of this system that appeal: the breadth of choices with the combined benefits and the cleverness of the design to provide an ever-changing situation to consider.
Each action is pretty straightforward. There are three sets of tiles for taking the building actions, laid out in a display. Managing mines or quarries increas- es your production capacity or stock of the relevant resource. Two build actions for tiles require you to pay resources to receive the benefit. Upgrade tiles are placed on your action board; wall con- struction tiles go adjacent to your action board, while building tiles are placed on the main board.
Part of your consideration is of course the cost, but also the bene- fits that are yielded. For the action board, links between adjacent tiles provide immediate benefits as well, so your planning will take these aspects into account. Building tiles that are placed on the board also provide bonuses as they are built adjacent to plaza tiles which have been seeded at the beginning of the game.
The last of the six actions is to advance on the King’s road, which requires egg tiles, which apparently was part of the foundation of the famous Charles Bridge. Advancing on the road provides specific ben- efits, and at the end of the road is the bridge, which grants even better advantages as you cross the bridge.
34 spielbox
Photo und Illustrations: Delicious Games