Council of Four

In Council of Four you and your opponents are striving to become the best merchants, by building emporiums in cities throughout the land. But to build, you have influence the councils in each of the three regions, and this negotiation is the crux of the game.

The board shows the regions with cities and connecting roads. You’ll notice that the city names all begin with a different letter, from A through to O. Also present are the four councils – one for each region, plus the Kings’ council – more on them in a bit. Each council is populated by four councillors of various colours. You begin the game with six influence cards, a little gold, and some assistants. On your turn you always collect an influence card, and then choose one of four available actions. The actions are as follows:

Pay influence cards that match the colours of councillors in order to pick up a building permit. If you don’t have (or don’t want to play) matching cards, you can part-purchase by spending gold, although doing so can get expensive. Having obtained a permit, another action is build an emporium: you flip an obtained permit face-down, and place an emporium in a city that matches the letter on the permit. Doing so gets you an instant reward (money, cards, points, or assistants) but not only that, will get you the rewards from all the other cities you are connected to that have your emporiums in them! So building a chain of cities can be very rewarding, although as the game continues it gets harder to do so – for every opponent with an already emporium in the city when you build, you must spend an assistant.

If the colours of the councillors aren’t matching your cards, a third action is electing a new councillor: simply slide a new councillor in of your choice into the council, causing the ‘oldest’ member to fall out the other end. Doing so also gets you four coins!

The fourth action is building emporiums without permits, which is where the King’s Council comes in – discard matching influence cards to do so. This can only be done in the city currently occupied by the king. You can move the king around the cities, but every city he travels between will cost you 2 gold. Finally, there are also some extra actions you can take involving your assistants: changing the available permit tiles for instance, or electing a councillor – but without getting the monetary reward for doing so as your main action. You can also pay three assistants to take an extra turn!

So on a turn by turn basis everything is reasonably simple, and fast-moving. But crucial to winning the game is grabbing bonuses: there are bonuses for being first to build an emporium in each city of a given region, and bonuses to be had for being first to build an emporium in each type of city: gold for instance will get you 20 points, as there are five gold cities, whereas the easy-to-achieve blue cities only get 5 points. The game end is triggered when any player places their last emporium on the board.