![]() The board before the beginning of the game.Īt the end of each Decade, there’s some inter-round scoring and each player resets their tableau so the three cards in the Action Row without Activation Cards underneath are all that’s left. They remembered to include exciting gameplay, though. El Grande and Hansa Teutonica don’t evoke much of a theme either and you’ll never once hear me complain. I don’t necessarily find that to be a grave sin. Just as well that I forgot to mention it, because the gameplay does n o t h i n g to evoke it. Why would there be an Influence Track? You’re competing to be Catherine the Great’s most trusted and influential advisor. Oh, I suppose I haven’t mentioned the theme yet. Fundamentally, you’ll draw cards, score points outright, add houses to cities on the board, or move up the Influence Track. While initially it seems like there are dozens of actions, there are really only a few, each coming in several mild variations. An orange card played beneath a blue card won’t do anything, but an orange card played beneath another orange card will allow that player to execute the card’s action and bonus, if it has one. What you’re trying to do with your activation cards is match suits. The Activation Card can be played beneath any Action Card that hasn’t already been activated. You start each Decade with three Action Cards already on the table, and each Action Card is played to the immediate right of the previous one. It is a coincidence that the Activation Cards are the last three slots.Įach turn, all players simultaneously play two cards from their hand, one to their Action Row and one to their Activation Row. The Action Row above, the Activation Row below. ![]() ![]() The cards played to the Activation Row have no function or purpose other than to activate-go figure-one of the cards in your Action Row. ![]() The lower of these two rows is your Activation Row. The upper of these two rows is your Action Row, which is to say it is the row with cards whose icons and actions you want to use. Over the course of a round, or “Decade” as the game calls them, you will play cards to two imaginary rows. What could go wrong?Ī remarkably simple game to teach in person, Catherine is a remarkably complicated one to teach via prose. The look of the thing, a map full of connected cities with a color palette that suggests beige even if it isn’t actually particularly beige, promised the sort of good old fashioned gaming experience you get with titles like El Grande and Hansa Teutonica. From the moment I first saw an ad for Catherine: The Cities of the Tsarina, I was interested. ![]()
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