The wife and I sat down for our first go at St. Petersburg this afternoon. We really had no idea what to expect and, after muddling through the rules (which were short but a little unclear in places), we were anticipating a cumbersome and clumsy game that probably wouldn't last long in our collection.

Were we ever wrong!

St. Petersburg is an engaging, easy to pick-up game (once you figure out the row rules) that gave us both a lot of enjoyment. The rules have been gone over exhaustively in other reviews so I'll concentrate more on what we liked about it and why it's a good 'couples' game.

Immersion Factor
While my wife (being Russian herself) was pretty sure that some of the buildings depicted on the map were not in St. Petersburg but Moscow, we both nevertheless thought the theme was well done. This sort of thing is apparent when, later in the game, we were talking more about the way our individual economic engines were working in terms that had less to do with game mechanics and more to do with the banter people might have about their workplaces. "Well of course you're making more money, you've got a lot of hard workers bringing in income and I have a bunch of managers mispending it!"

Strategic Variation
What I love about playing games with my wife is that we do think about strategy differently and thus get excited when we find a game that lets us really explore those differences without penalizing us for not doing the 'obvious' thing. These are hard to find in our experience (I'd also throw out the suggestion of Carolus Magnus as another game that's really good about this sort of thing). We tackled St. Petersburg from two opposite ends, with me using more of a 'zergling rush' of workers strategy supported by a tax man early on (which netted me TONS of rubles) while she concentrated more on upgrading buildings and nobles, making sure to gain a steady income of rubles and VPs each phase. In the end we were sitting at 131-129 VPs so really the game was a toss-up and any minor thing either of us would've done differently would've easily swayed it the other way.

Skill vs. Luck
Being a card-based game, there was a definitely an element of luck as in what cards became available during each of the phases. But it seemed that there were a lot of options to diminish the luck factor and what remained did not ever give us the feeling of being 'mana shorted' or generally screwed just because of bad draws. Overall, both of us felt we were utilizing much more skill in manipulating the circumstances than we were being forced to react to random events.

Couple or Uncouple
Well, we didn't kill each other during or after the game... so that's a good sign. While we could definitely see that there were several opportunities to screw the other player, they weren't particularly vicious but more along the lines of 'okay, you really had to do that to stop me from steamrolling you.' So there was a lot of 'nice' screwing going on? With more people I could see the 'screw' factor getting meaner and more intense however, as well as money getting much tighter due to less multiple card cost deductions.

Possible Negatives
This didn't seem to be a particularly short game, about 90 minutes or so. It was the first time though so likely it'll run closer to an hour.

There was some math involved. Nothing too heavy but scoring could get a little cumbersome as the game progressed. It did help that the designers thoughtfully treid to keep some of the scoring elements in easy multiples of 3.

Last words? If you like a good, medium-light strategy game that involves some thought and rewards strategic diversity you sjould definitely give this one a whirl.