The aim of the game is to build prestige and the winner is the player with the most prestige points at the end of the game. Prestige is gained by making donations to churches, each church has five bonus prestige tiles. The first gets you a straight five prestige points. The rest give you prestige points based on how many you have of a certain thing multiplied by certain amount. These bonus tiles, apart from the straight point one, can be scored at any point (usually when it will score you the most) but are any unscored ones are scored at the end of the game.
What you can do each turn is decided on a Rondel with tasks marked around it. You can move up to 3 spaces round the roundell for free any more and you have to pay in prestige points.
The Rondel is made up of the following Tasks:
Dockyard Where you can pay resources to build ships in the docks which are used to trade goods. There are 3 docks marked 1, 2 & 3, everyone starts with a ship in the no 3 dock which allows then to trade up to 3 items of the same good for the current value marked on the board. The price goes down as people build the relevant buildings giving them additional goods. When a dock gets one more ship in then players all the ships are moved down to the next smallest dock (Except for the new ship placed). If they are in the last dock when this happens the ships are removed from the board back to the owners stock.
Sugar This produces 1 sugar + any additional sugar given by buildings.
Church This allows you to make a donation to the church of your choice. You can make as many donations as you can afford to make. Each level of donation has a cost associated with it and this goes up the more donations are made. Players leave markers on church's to indicate the level of donations made. If you managed to complete a church you gain the right to build buildings anywhere in the city without restriction. Each donation to the church nets you a bonus scoring token, the first gets you 5 prestige points the others give you prestige points based on how many you have of certain things.
Trade This allows you to buy or sell goods, using your ship allows you to get the best price for you goods. You can always sell goods without a ship for a base ?30 but this is a last resort move.
Cloth This works the same as the sugar one.
Guildhall This allows you to build a building provided you have made a contribution to a church. you can only build out from a church you have dontaed to or adjacent to a another one of your buildings.
Beer This works the same as the sugar one.
Trade Same as the other trade.
The resources you can buy are Wood, Clay and Bells. You can only ever own one bell and these are only used to complete churches. Once a church is completed that player takes a church piece from the board and places it on the church he completed. This reveals the number of prestige points he gets for this. Play ends when the sixth and final church is complete when players score any unscored bunuses and the player with the most prestige wins. Players gain prestige at the end for every ?100 they have, resources and goods can be sold at this time for ?50 each.
Each turn in this game is pretty quick so the game plays through fairly quickly. There was an element of taking actions to scupper other players actions and scoring, especially near the end to prevent leader run away. In the end the scores were fairly close.
The pieces are very well made and the board is both large and colourful.
I did enjoy this game and I would play this again now I have a better understanding of what priority to do things, but have a slight worry that without any random elements and the same group of players it could become very samey.
