The Game
In Signorie you play noble families in 15th century Italy. It is an age
of political turmoil and great clans rise to power in the Italian cities,
controlling politics, the economy and the military balance. You are the leader
of your family. You arrange for the sons in the family to get educated in
various fields - politics, religion and military. You get the daughters
married off to other major clans to build and cement alliances. Doing these
and a few other things in the game give you victory points. At the end of 7
rounds, the highest scorer wins.
This is the main game board. The game supports 2 to 4 players. At the start of
a round, dice in 5 colours are rolled. On your turn, you claim one die to
perform an action. Every round you may claim at most 4 dice, and they must be
in different colours.
This is one of the player boards. They are almost exactly the same, the only
exception being the rightmost column. The emblems each player is allowed to
collect are different. The five columns in the middle represent five sets of
actions you get to perform. Whenever you claim a die from the main board, you
place it in a column matching the die colour, then pick one action in the
column to perform. The space for the die in each column has a number, which is
the base cost of performing an action. Green actions are most expensive, at
$5. The number on the die is the discount you get. If you pick a high number,
you can perform the action cheaply or even for free. However at the end of the
round your die values are summed up. If you do not exceed 13, you gain a
bonus. So there is a conflict between getting discounts and getting the
round-end bonuses. Sometimes you may even take fewer dice for the sake of the
round-end bonus. That means performing fewer than 4 actions.
Once you pick a die, you have four action options from which to pick one.
Let's take a yellow die as an example. In the yellow column on the player
board, you can see an envelope with a yellow seal. This refers to two actions
on the main board. There are 10 action tiles on the main board which are
randomised every round. There will be 2 actions associated with each type of
envelope. One will require expending sons, and the other daughters.
On the player board, there are two other icons in the yellow box. The coin
icon means you may take some cash. The white disc above a green circle means
you may spend money to recruit a helper. You place the helper at a job in the
green column. From then on, whenever you claim a green die, this helper gets
to perform an action for free.
The leftmost column on the player board shows five people - you the clan
leader and four other elders. Initially you are the only one who is married,
thus that while pawn representing your wife. At the end of each of the first
five rounds, if your die total doesn't exceed 13, you get to marry your
elders. The purpose of being married is to produce children. There is a
specific action you need to perform to produce children (this sounds
inappropriate but I'm talking about game rules here okay). You roll dice to
determine whether the offspring is a son or a daughter. Children are
essentially just another resource type. Some tasks must be performed by sons,
some by daughters. Both sons and daughters are used as currency for some
actions.
The rightmost column indicates emblems you may collect when sending sons out
to ally with other clans or marrying daughters to other clans. Emblems are
worth points if you collect at least three in the same row.
This is part of the main board, showing the 10 actions available to players
which are shuffled every round. Actions which end up in the top row may be
performed by expending daughters. Those in the second row require expending
sons.
The game is played over 7 rounds. These are the benefits you get at the end of
a round if your die total doesn't exceed 13. Those benefits on the square
tiles are randomly set up before the start of a game. The benefits for Rounds
6 and 7 are related to scoring victory points. You may spend $5 to score 5
victory points. The Round 6 tile allows you to score 4 victory points per city
where you have a daughter married off to. The Round 7 tile allows you to score
2 victory points per helper employed. You get to see the scoring conditions
before the game starts so you can plan ahead.
The three columns on the right are the three fields your sons can get into -
politics, religion and military. I think of them as sending your boys to be
educated. As the placement spots on the main board get taken up, the minimum
qualifications for sending sons become higher. Initially any basic diploma
would do, but later you'd need a bachelor's degree, a master's degree and
eventually a doctorate. When your son is highly educated, he scores more
points for you when he establishes an alliance. Studying more is a good
thing.
At game setup, two emblems are randomly placed at each city. Those on the left
can be claimed when you marry off a daughter at the city. Those on the right
are to be claimed by sons forming alliances. At the start of every round, if
any emblem has been claimed in the previous round, a new one is drawn to fill
the vacant slot. Each city has 8 occupant spots. Once all filled, you may no
longer send any son or daughter.
The overall flow of the game is training your sons and daughters and sending
them out to create alliances. Sons need to be educated first, so there is more
effort required. For daughters, you need to save enough money for the dowries.
Both sons and daughters are resources you need to produce and manage. You have
to remember to find wives for your elders and to perform the family growth
action.
The Play
Han suggested
Signorie. The two of us plus Allen played on
BoardGameArena.com. I started off with the rush strategy, going for quantity and not quality. I
sent my sons and daughters out as quickly as I could, grabbing as many emblems
as possible. As long as the boys met the minimum requirement, I pulled them
out of school to go to work. I didn't ask them to study more in order to score
more points. The advantage of doing this was I could grab more of the right
emblems. In the late game, one problem that came up for Han and Allen was a
lack of the right emblems. This was bad because if no one could claim any of
the emblems, no replacements would be drawn. We would be stuck. However
emblems was just one of many ways to score points, and it wasn't a major
one.
I was the earliest to go out grabbing emblems (those on the right side of my
player board). However I did not employ many helpers (white discs). At this
point I only had two helpers - first column third position, and third column
first position. Allen and Han spent much more effort in the early game
recruiting helpers. This was the right thing to do. Helpers basically give you
free actions, so it is best to get many of them early, and fully utilise them
throughout the game. Allen started scoring points rather late, because he
spent much time setting up his household of helpers. I had a gut feeling I
should be recruiting more helpers, but I was impetuous and impatient to get
going. By mid game I got into a tough situation. It was hard to decide whether
to still recruit helpers. In the late game helpers are usually not worth it
because you won't get to use them many times. The mid game is neither here nor
there. You would use them a few times, but it's hard to gauge whether the
return on investment makes sense. Eventually I didn't have many helpers. I
focused my helpers on doing just one thing - collecting books. Books collected
every round determine the turn order in the subsequent round. They are reset
every round. If you collect enough books, you also score points. I worked on
books for both the turn order advantage and the points.
Both Allen and Han had many more helpers than I did, which meant they
performed more actions than I did. Eventually Allen won with a comfortable
margin. I had expected to come in second place, but right at the end Han
overtook me by 1 point! Conclusion: Being impatient is bad.
Han's sons studied hard. By the end of the game, he still had kids at school
which he was not able to send out to form alliances. However these boys still
scored half the points they would have scored had they found jobs. That turned
out to be a decent chunk of points. My kids studied only for the sake of
passing exams and getting minimum wage jobs. Once I had enough emblems, I
didn't even bother to send more of them to school. I kept them home to plough,
sow and feed chicken. By game end I had no sons scoring points for me.
At the bottom left, two of the round end bonus tiles had been removed,
which meant this was Round 3 now.
I was purple, Han blue and Allen yellow. Allen was last to start collecting
emblems. However at this point both of them had 5 to 6 helpers, while I only
had two.
When deciding which die to pick, you have to consider what your opponents have
taken. If all your opponents have taken dice of a certain colour, you know the
last one is safe and there is no urgency to take it. If an opponent has many
helpers of a certain colour, you know he will want to take a die in that
colour. If an opponent is low on cash, you know he can't afford some of the
dice, so they are temporarily safe. Picking dice is not just about how
desperately you want them. You have to think from your opponents'
perspectives.
By game end all the slots at every city were filled. We could no longer send
any more sons or daughters. In a 3-player game, one of the cities is not in
play.
When our game ended, I (purple) had only two rows with emblems, while both Han
and Allen had three rows. They took some generic emblems which were worth only
1 point each. Think of these as minor clans. Each row of emblems scores points
only when you have at least three. So if you have difficulties getting a third
emblem, you may have to take a generic one, so that you don't waste the points
on the first two.
The Thoughts
Signorie is essentially a resource conversion game. You need to produce
money, sons and daughters, and these resources will eventually be converted to
victory points. Sons go to school and then are expended to set up alliances
with the major clans. When you set aside enough money to marry off your
daughters, they are expended to build ties with the major clans too. Many
actions require money. The most unique aspect of the game is the dice
selection mechanism. This is the core of the game. It creates interesting and
challenging decisions. The rest of the game is built around this core
mechanism. Initially the number of different actions feels overwhelming, but
once you grasp the few key processes - about what sons do and what daughters
do, the actions are not hard to understand and remember.
Player interaction does not feel direct. However I can see that other players'
actions can impact yours significantly. It just doesn't feel so. Because of
this the game does not feel confrontational. I can see plenty of competition,
including for the emblems, for the high valued dice, and sometimes even for
the low valued dice. The limited number of spaces can be a source of
contention too, but this will probably happen only near game end when space is
running out. In the early game it doesn't seem hard to fulfil the criteria to
claim a space. Eurogame designers are skilled in creating this kind of player
interaction. They don't feel confrontational, but if you look slightly deeper
they do hurt your opponents.
I find Signorie quite a succinct game. Not that it is simple. Certainly
the many action types take a little while to digest. Once I got past these, I
find that it doesn't have much extra fat. Some games make me feel the designer
added more stuff for the sake of having more stuff. In Signorie, almost
everything you do relates to cultivating sons and daughters to serve the
family. The fun to complexity ratio is high. It has just enough rules to bring
out the fun.
