31 Jul

Louis XIV

Filed under: Boardgames No Responses

The game uses cards arranged in a specific layout to form a virtual board.

Ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, I’ve been fascinated by the Sun King. The novels depicted him as being by far the most intelligent and far-sighted monarch of his time who, thanks to his ruthlessly efficient intelligence network, was perfectly aware of the attempts by various factions of his court to influence him and used that knowledge to his advantage. So it may be somewhat intimidating that in this game, you play one of these courtiers trying to manipulate the king.

Louis XIV is sort of an abstract area majority game, except that instead of a map or even a real board, the area is defined by a set of twelve cards representing the key individuals that make up the court. These are arranged according to a preset layout to form a sort of checkerboard and the players’ influence markers are allowed to move along cards that touch each other at the corners. Since you’re supposed to put your markers on top of these cards and keep the general supply of markers that are not available for use in the spaces between the cards, it’s quite awkward. You even need to flip some of these cards at the end of every turn so it’s very easy to knock them out of position. I think they messed up the components for this one and should have used a real board or else heavy tiles instead of light cardboard.

Like other area majority games, the central mechanic revolves around placing influence markers in such a way that you either have the most or the second most markers on the cards you’re competing for. The complication here is that each player’s supply of markers is divided into a personal supply which are the ones that are available for immediate use and a general supply, which are unavailable. Each round, the players are dealt a hand of five influence cards. These cards either depict one of the historical characters on the main board or is a wildcard that can be used with any character. You play these cards to either place markers from your personal supply onto the corresponding card that forms the board or to retrieve markers from the general supply for later use.

I noticed that the game uses the 17th and 18th century portraits of the historical characters. That must really help them to save on art costs as the images are now public domain.

In either case, using the named cards allows you to place or retrieve three markers while the wildcards only allow you to manipulate two markers. If you do choose to place markers on the characters, you can then to move some of them onto diagonally connected ones, taking care that at least one marker needs to be left on every character that you travel through. The round ends when all players have played four of the five cards in their hands and then the character cards are evaluated.

This brings us back to the earlier point about how the character cards can be flipped. All of the cards are double-sided and show the same award on both sides but each side shows different rules for getting that award. Some of them give the award to the player with the most influence markers on the card and nothing to everyone else. Other cards show a cost in gold coins. The player with a plurality of markers still gets the award for free but everyone else with at least one marker there can pay the requisite amount of money to get the award. Yet another type of card shows a certain number of influence markers on it and simply gives the award to anyone who has at least that number of markers on it.

The interesting part is that whenever a player achieves a plurality of markers on a card, those markers are discarded into the general supply instead of being returned to the player for future use and the card is flipped so the rules on the other side will be in effect on the next turn. This means that a player who tries to win pluralities a lot in order to gain awards without spending any money will likely be out of markers to use the following turn, making for a rather elegant balance.

One of the character cards used in this game, in this case Le Grand Dauphin, who was considered the likeliest heir to Louis XIV. In this case, the word grand doesn’t mean majestic but instead refers to his large physical size.

The awards themselves are pretty standard stuff for these sorts of games. In addition to the influence cards, players also get mission cards. Each mission card needs two mission markers to complete and as you might have guessed, you get these markers as awards for influencing the characters. Completed missions are worth five points each, so they’re the primary means of scoring in the game, but they also provide a wide variety of powers, such as allowing you to play influence markers from the general supply directly onto specific areas of the board. There are actually three levels of difficulty for the mission cards. Each one is still worth the same number of points but the harder missions simply give more useful powers.

The other source of points are the coat-of-arms tokens. These are mainly awarded for influencing some characters but you also get them if you have unused money and mission markers at the end of the game. I understand that they’re a constant target of criticism as while each token is nominally worth one point each, they are gained face down and come in several different designs, giving players who manage to amass the largest collection of each design bonus points. This means that this bonus is essentially random and completely unpredictable until the very end.

A couple of other rules to go over before this part is over. Some characters award cards instead of mission markers or coats-of-arms. These include an extra influence card, which basically allows the player with one an extra action during the following turn. The other type are intrigue cards, which are also character specific and allow you to place extra influence markers on that character just before it’s evaluated for pluralities, allowing for last minute upsets. The final bit is of course, the Louis XIV marker itself. At the beginning of every round, a turn is turned over to indicate how much gold each player gets as income and where the Louis XIV marker goes. Regardless of which character the Sun King ends up on, its rules and rewards remain essentially the same, but whoever gets the most influence there also wins a crown marker which can be used in lieu of any type of mission marker.

Lots of influence markers competing for the king’s favor in the final round.

Normally, I tend not to do well in area majority games, especially against Sean, but I think I made a pretty good account for myself in this one, even if I still lost. I think the more abstracted nature of the virtual board helped as I seem to have a problem visually scanning traditional maps. Plus I think that this game’s method of winning mission counters rather than straight out points of varying values makes it easier to analyze the potential returns of placing influence markers in different spots. It’s also interesting that unlike other area majority games, you can’t really completely shut out someone in this one because you have spaces that allow players to gain things just by paying or having a requisite number of markers there.

One thing I didn’t quite like about Louis XIV is that the special powers conferred by completed missions seem highly variable. Not only are they completely unpredictable but it seems odd that you would give an in-game advantage  along with valuable points that determine victory. Other than this, I find the overall game merely okay. While I enjoyed looking at the portraits of the different historical personalities, the game’s rules don’t really bring out the theme.

Written on July 31 2010 and is filed under Boardgames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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