Prowl: Clans & Cunning

Prowl: Clans & Cunning is a game from Singapore, designed by Russell Wee and published by Playlogue. It is a card game set in a fantastical Japanese Warring States period. There are four factions in the game and you secretly support one of them. During the game you influence the strengths of the factions. At the end of the game, if the faction you support is the strongest, you win. 

During game setup the relative strengths of the four factions are randomly determined. Everyone draws six cards. The cards come in four suits matching the four factions. Each card is a fighter with its own power. During the game you do not draw cards. These six cards are all you have. 

Of these six cards, you start off picking one of them to become the faction you support. You place that card face-down before you, keeping it secret. Now you only have five cards left. Each turn you must play a card to perform an action. You will only have 5 actions in the whole game. There are three types of action. The basic one is playing a card and using its power. There are two parts to the card power, and you can use them in any order. You get to strengthen the faction of the card, i.e. increasing its rank. You also use the power described by the card text. These powers vary greatly, and there is a theme to each of the four factions. 

The second action type is swapping your faction card. Play your card face-down to become your new faction card, and reveal then discard the old faction card. The third action type is accusing an opponent of supporting a specific faction. When you do this, you discard a card face-up without strengthening the faction or using the card power. The opponent being accused must answer truthfully. If you guess right, you may choose to steal the king token (a tiebreaker token), or you may force your opponent to change his faction card next round. 

Throughout the game you will try to manipulate the relative strengths of the factions, hopefully making your faction the strongest. If you are able to guess your opponents' factions, it can help tremendously. It is possible that multiple players support the same faction. If you see that someone seems to be helping your faction win, chances are he's on the same side. However, there can only be one winner. This is when the competition for the king token (the tiebreaker) becomes important. One twist is, in this situation, if your shared faction is the strongest but neither of you have the king token, both of you will lose, and victory goes to the next strongest faction. If you feel confident about that opponent supporting the same faction as you, you can accuse him and force him to change his faction card. But then if he is smart, maybe he will have a card of that same faction on standby for exactly this play. 

To be honest I didn't have high expectations when I listened to the game overview. Even after reading the rules, I wasn't convinced this would be interesting. Nothing in the rules pops out to say "interesting mechanism". It all seems to be something I've seen somewhere else before. Only by sitting down to play the game I discovered how delicious it is. This is a short game, short enough to feel like a microgame. You only have 5 actions, so every action feels important. This is a compact game, as in you have few decisions to make, but there are many considerations behind each decision. There are multiple possibilities to contemplate. Even that first decision during setup is not easy - which faction to support. When you choose a card to be your faction, you are already sacrificing its strength. That's one card fewer you can use for strengthening the faction. The faction being secret is clever. You do have to be careful not to be too blatantly supporting a specific faction, because there are consequences. Or maybe you are bluffing? Or you pretend to be bluffing?

This is a card with a quirky power. You give it to a target player, and he must then discard a card. If you think deeper about this, this can be a powerful play in the second last round, potentially disrupting someone else's perfect plan. Often players will keep a strong card as the last card, so that they can make a solid final push. If you play this Untrained Acolyte on them, you not only spoil their plans, you now also know exactly what card they have in hand for the final turn. 

The cards are large, showcasing the art

I had thought Prowl would be a simple light game, but it turned out to be a compact, clever and thinky microgame. Few actions, but there are mind games and plenty of tactics to explore.