inconsequential ruminations

We played Traders of Genoa with three players on Wednesday night. I had never played it before and enjoyed it, but it must have been designed for five.

As you may have guessed by now, exhaustive descriptions of game mechanics bore me. Compare the word counts of Shannon Appelcline’s review ([*3,329*]) to the rules ([*5,432*]). I would rather dive into the rules than read a review of that length, so I will just write the next two paragraphs and hope they are enough for you.

Traders of Genoa is based around an 8×8 grid of buildings and streets, in Renaissance Genoa. Players take it in turn to manoeuvre a stack of six discs, the trader’s tower, around the grid. Each orthogonal move leaves a disk behind, so the stack can move five squares maximum. On each building square, an informal negotiation/auction takes place among the non-controlling players with the controller deciding who wins the right to take an action. Players can only take one action per turn. Road squares allow no actions, so players are often left with nothing. The controller pockets the cash, special cards or goods offered for that right. Each action allows one player to take advantage of the benefit of the building beneath, for instance collecting goods, cashing in goods or collecting special cards.

The heart of the game is the competition among players to influence the route of the tower. There are different ways to amass ducats (victory points). One of the two main options is to go for Prestige cards, which represent buildings around the board. These score at the end of the game and are worth more in large numbers, rather like aristocrats in Saint Petersburg, but they must be connected at the end of the game. The other main approach is to fulfil contracts, by collecting various goods at some buildings and then delivering to others.

From that dense description, you can see there is a lot to Traders of Genoa and due to this complexity and the components it resembles Princes of Florence. It takes at least one game to really understand what is going on. I was sure I was going to win until the final scoring, but I had not bought any Prestige cards and the other two players completely destroyed me. I enjoyed myself and it was generally popular. The negotiations are tense and there is plenty of bluffing. My only problem with it is that I suspect it only really comes into its own with five players, the maximum allowed, due to increased competition for building actions. I also suspect it is a bit too long, but that is easily fixed by playing fewer rounds. ([*448*])