[Review - Discussion] Princes of Florence

Is this game 'solvable'? Is there a 'best strategy'?

I am reluctant to play Princes of Florence because, as far as I can tell, there is only one strategy - using your first seven or so actions to build up support cards, and using your last seven turns to put on works. I have won the last five or six times people have persuaded me to play by following this strategy.

Why does the strategy work? Basically, putting on works is your major source of VPs. You can get other VPs through special cards, etc. but for these, you either need to be pretty lucky with your draws, or spend a disproportionate amount of time building towards them. Why put on the works at the end? Because works at the end will score you an extra ten or so VPs more than those you score at the start because of the extra stuff you've bought in the mean time. You may need to do an early work to raise extra cash, but appart from that there is no incentive - the bonus for getting the highest work is simply not big enough to be enticing, especially since you're giving up an action which can usually be spent to ensure that you get the bonus for putting on the best work later.

How should you play this strategy? Well, you should always get a profession card - you need them for the work, and they add one point to it. Getting extra also allows you to smoothen your draw out. Jesters are great (but you knew that). So are spare profession cards (half of a jester). You want to get one or two landscapes (matching your cards), one or two freedoms (ditto), one or two buildings (ditto) - spread these out so that you maximise points across all your cards. Save one high paying one for each of the later rounds to get the biggest work bonus. If you have nothing better to do, then get a bonus build card, but ususally you shouldn't have the free actions to do this.

How can you beat this strategy? Well, you can play the same strategy against it, or you can go for extreme strategies with the bonus cards (getting the builders and filling the board, and getting bonus cards for lots of buildings, etc.). If you're lucky, you'll pull it off - if not, not. Probably not in my experience, but other players may not have been playing the strategies optimally.

Unfortuantely, this strategy is boring. By the time you've started round three, you should know all the actions you need to do in the future. From this point, the only things that can affect your actions are the auctions (and you can usually get something), and which exhibitions others put on that you can steal (and the choices there are pretty easy). The rest of the game is just seeing how it pans out, and usually carrying off the victory.

There is, of course, just one strategy in PoF: to finish with more points than the second-placed player. :-) And, as with many other games that work in this fashion, that is surprisingly often dictated by the pattern of the game. (Are you getting things cheap? Do X. Are they being over-valued? Do Y. Are people not taking certain lines? Do Z.)

I agree with Sebastian up to a point: the "do 7 Works at the end of the game" is a very solid, reliable approach which will always do well. However, I certainly don't think it should win as often as Sebastian is claiming* - it strikes me as one of those lines of play that is put into a game to ensure that there is always a solid "second-place" strategy that will win if the other players get side-tracked and fight each other too badly. (We actually talked about this tonight at a test session - Sebastian was there - that it's often useful for a game to have this sort of line, but that alternative strategies need to be more interesting or perhaps more "risky", but ought to win more often.)

(*I'm not suggesting that Sebastian is lying in his claim, merely that it seems that the other players may not have been alert to what he was doing. Or that they were but didn't mind.)

It's worth remembering that to put on seven Works requires recruitment cards and/or profession cards, and these should be hotly contested: in a five-player game there are very few and it is not uncommon for everyone to use an action in round 1 to grab one - and I think that leaves only one left over. This makes reaching the 7 Works target trickier than it sounds. It's not so bad with fewer players, but then everyone should reach them and you need to squeeze your points from other sources (cf St Petersberg, which is so much better with 2 players because the Nobles bonus is clearly far less significant.)

And the other routes to victory that Sebastian mentions (builders, bonus cards, prestige cards) are exactly those enjoyable "risky" routes that make the game consistently interesting to me. I like the heavy builder strategy, because it is so under-rated and thus has that "under the radar" feel about it (I've won off just 4 works, but they scored enormously thanks to bonus cards and so on.) Sure you can play the "safe" way, but I don't think you should (a) win, or (b) have much of a good time ;-)

And yes it's true that after round 3 you are pretty much set in your strategy - and I think that's where the auction can become serious fun as the things people want are more evident and other players can take advatntage of this knowledge; it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that money is still tight in the game and squeezing every last florin of value is essential - yes, you can always buy something for 200, but if the other players are paying attention, it shouldn't be what you really want.
Likewise the permuations are all listed for you so it's not hard to see where someone is going and very easy to get in their way: after all, if you know someone wants to hire the Astronomer (because of what they have bought), you don't have to use him yourself until you have to (I have won a game this way and it was most entertaining. Not for my opponent, admittedly ;-)
But, like Puerto Rico, it is perilously easy for players to lose sight of the control they do have over other players' positions and this can lead to what I think are mistaken impressions of single strategies ("buy Jesters. Win".)

Firstly, I did not say that the strategy was unbeatable - people playing the same strategy but doing it better or luckier will clearly beat it - as will people having sufficient luck with extreme strategies such as going mad on the buildings, or creating stuff to appropriate to several well matching bonus cards.

One of the reasons that this strategy works well is that that is not really possible. Pretty much everything availiable to auction is good in one way or another. Jesters give two points all works, one builder allows you to smooth your cashflow to get the two or three buildings you need without having to put on an early work for extra cash, the recruitment cards give a one bonus to all works and helps deal with running out of profession cards (particularly in a five player game). And landscape cards appropriate to your professions are also always useful.

If you were going for a builder strategy, or for a bonus card strategy, then this point would be more valid - these, however, are the competing strategies.

I've usually said at the beginning that that's what the winning strategy's been for me when I've explained why I'm ambivelent about the game. And I'm not convinced that I'm likeable enough for people to simply give me the win, although it would be nice :wink:.

Essentially, I think that for a second-place strategy, it's a little too good. This doesn't mean PoF is not a game, it must be said - there's a good lot of tactical manouvering as to who can pull off the strategy best / beat it using one of the off-the-wall approaches. It's just the lack of strategies that work mean that it's fallen from a 'very good' game to a 'yet another' game in my estimation.

Taking the analogy of PR, my view is that PoF is like PR if, for example, only the building strategy worked. Sure, you need to decide what buildings to buy. Certainly, you can pick up some points on the side by shipping some goods. But when it comes down to it, everyone has got to go for buildings, or hope that they're extremely lucky with shipping goods, in order to win.

What I'd want PoF to be like, is where there are questions of whether it's worthwhile to put on early works to do one thing, or take bonus cards to do another thing, and so forth. Instead, there is a swing of between ten and fiveteen VP between putting on an early and not (you loose an action that could put between one and two VP on each work from that point, and this work has no benefit of later actions that put VPs on work) which means that unless you're cash strained, putting on a work is .. suboptimal, and actions are so tight that punting on getting a bonus card is usually something that you can't afford compared to the guaranteed bonus of getting a freedom, building, etc. [If, for example, the best works bonus was a bonus of ten, then getting early works and bonus cards to push up the value would start becoming a lot more of an interesting decision. It'd probably break the game in other ways, but...]

What you refer to as strategies - getting a builder early and making effective use of him - I'd refer to as tactics. Buying an extra building rather than an extra freedom is merely looking at the works you're going to put on, and working which one gives you the better return - in essense, judging how to best turn your limited actions and money into VPs for works. Since you know pretty much exactly what works you'll be putting on, it's just a matter of totting up the points.

But don't you think that with all of the hard-core gamers who have played this game so many times, someone else would have figured out that there's only one strategy, and would have said something about it before now? And wouldn't its ratings be lower than they are? I just continue to think that if you posted this on BGG or in spielfrieks, someone could come
up with an effective counterstrategy.

Of course, it's possible that you're right, but I'd rather see it demonstrated in the context of a discussion or consensus among experts of the game rather than as an assertion.

Personally, I'd rather see it disproved :wink: . That's one reason I brought it up here - I'd like to see someone say 'no, no - that can be countered by an agressive early works strategy and then buying bonus cards at the end' or whatever.

Looking through BGG, the comments there indicate that if the other players are bidding highly enough for jesters, recruitment cards, etc, then going for a building and VP card strategy works. Except for that, most of the guides seem to be talking about how best to implement the strategy I mentioned. Maybe it's just that noone else sees it as a problem, which could easily be the case - as mentioned, it's still a game even without the strategy decision. [For ease of reference, the two main sets of strategy comments are in the threads http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/36487 and http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/33523.]