-
Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
-
Palatinus is a small game that went through a brief period of popularity in one of my gaming circles. It’s been some years since we last played it but I’ve found myself getting an itch to play it again.
Palatinus is a game that made hardly any splash when it came out and you could pick it up for next to nothing at the Mayfair booth at conventions. Maybe you still can or maybe it has gone out of print and sunk beneath the waves with other forgotten games.
Generally speaking, Palatinus has not been well received on the geek. The game is noted for being incredibly dry and abstract, as well having convoluted scoring that is not terribly intuitive. And I won’t deny that that is pretty accurate.
However, my main game table started out as a Go group so almost no theme is not a big deal for us and abstract is fine as well as long as the mechanics of the game are solid. Palatinus also has a very short playing time, which is also a plus. It’s a brain burning puzzle that plays out in about a half hour. We felt (and will probably feel again when we revisit it) that it packs a whole lot of thinking and double guessing into a very short playing time.
Palatinus is an area of control game with some elements of bluffing. The board is made up of seven hills that are made up of seven hexes, each with six spots to place tokens. The farmer and merchant tokens let players gain influence over hills, with whoever has the most influence getting the point marker for the hill. Their measure of influence depends on the blank spaces or tokens beside them. However, there are also centurions who can capture tokens for points and take them out of the equation for controlling a hill.
Part of the kicker for Palatinus is that the hills interlock and tokens can influence tokens on other hills. However, each hill is resolved one at a time in the scoring turn so, for instance, a key token for one hill could be captured by a centurion on another hill before it is able to add its influence.
On top of all that, some of the tokens have a hidden side and are not revealed until the scoring, adding a bluffing element to the game.
In the end, Patatinus becomes an interlocking puzzle in which you have to consider timing and do your best to outguess your opponents. All of a board that could fit on a TV tray and in about a half hour. It is definitely a gamer’s game and much deeper than it looks at first.
And that’s why it kept hitting the table for us. It was a game that kept challenging us and kept us on our toes. It might be a dry game of hexes but the interaction is constant and it is a game that, when you win, you did it by successfully outmaneuvering your opponents.
|
|
