Praga Caput Regni

Praga Caput Regni feels like the designer’s love letter to his home town – or city, in Prague’s case. In the game, players oversee the medieval construction of key landmarks that still stand today: the King Charles Bridge; the cathedral.  How you go about this building is the key feature of the game, as the choices you make – and the timing you make them with – define your success, or lack of. The goal is to most impress the aforementioned king – to do that, you score the most victory points. To do that… well. Hold onto your construction hats.

Each player begins with a player board showing their gold and stone crane, which track how much gold and stone you have at any given moment; and also your gold and stone mines, which track how much of each resource you can get when you ‘run production’ on either.

Running production is just one of several actions you can choose from on your turn. On the main board, as well as the fledgling Prague itself are a number of other artefacts, one of which is the action wheel. This is populated by action tiles at the start of the game, and you begin your turn by selecting one. Having chosen the action, you also get a reward from the wheel itself – some stone, gold, a window – more on windows in a bit – or a special one-off ability, such as turning gold into eggs. We’ll come to eggs later too.

Then you take your action. You can build buildings in the city, contribute to the construction of the King’s Road, run production as previously mentioned, upgrade your actions, or build walls.

Buildings score you points and/or other rewards, but here we need to pause and look at the Hunger Wall and Cathedral, in their 3D cardboard splendour in a corner of the board. When you build it’s likely that the buildings reward you red or blue bonus tokens. At the end of the game, these will score according to how far you’ve pushed this cube along these tracks, representing your contribution to their construction. As well as fuelling the collection of the tokens, buildings can also push you along the tracks.

Briefly, the King’s Road showers you with goodies (especially if you have eggs to contribute), upgrading your actions boosts other actions for the rest of the game (eg get gold every time you build a building) – these upgrades are physical tiles that cover and replace your basic actions on an action board – and finally walls go around your action board, providing potential benefits now, and points at the end of the game – the more walls the better.

Eggs aren’t quite as incongruous as they might sound – King Charles famously used them in the construction of the bridge, where the King’s Road enters the city proper. Windows are used in two ways – one is to push you along in the Cathedral/Hunger Wall, another is to faciliate bonus turns – you only get sixteen standard turns in the entire game, so this can be extremely useful.

There are a lot of spinning plates here and we can’t possibly cover everything, not even briefly. But it’s probably worth mentioning that the action selection from the wheel is seeded with tension – some spots are free, some spots cost you to take the action. Others reward you for taking the action! But the wheel is in motion: at the end of your turn, you put the action tile back in the wheel at 11 o’clock, and rotate the wheel clockwise, rotating all the actions as you do so.