Designed by: Michael Kiesling,Wolfgang Kramer
The theme of The Palaces of Carrara is that you are builders in Italy, trying to time your purchases of marble at the optimum moment. Optimal marble purchase might sound like a curiously banal theme for a game, but fear not: it’s a tricksy beast that will appeal to many.
Each player starts with some money (kept behind a screen) and their own player mat, showing a bunch of cities – and a larger board is placed centrally with a moveable wheel. This wheel is the key to Carrara being more than the sum of its parts: marble bricks are placed here, and during the game the wheel will turn. The position of the wheel determines the price of the various bricks: the more it turns, the cheaper they become. But if you get your timing wrong, someone will nab your bricks before you can…
On your turn you have three options – you can buy marble as above, you can build a building with your marble, or you can score.
What colour marble you build with depends on the city you build the building in – each city only accepts certain colours: you pay the cost in marble and place your building with that city. When you score you can score either a city or a building: if you score a type of building, the number on each of those buildings is multiplied by the number in the city itself; bringing you rewards of either victory points, or money. Scoring a city works similarly; you score all the buildings in that city, and in doing so prevent any of your opponents scoring the same city during the game.
Buildings also have symbols on them showing objects – when you score a building, you take a matching object (a crown, or a book, etc) piece from the supply and put it in your player board (objects can also be bought, for ten money)
The game can end in one of two ways – either all the buildings run out, or one of the players meets a set of victory conditions: a number of scoring markers played, the value of your buildings reading a certain point, and the collection of a set number of objects. The player who meets the conditions first triggers the final round (giving the other players one last chance to do likewise). Players add up the value of their buildings, coins, and symbols and the player with the most – wins.
There is certainly opportunity to spoil people's plans - either by taking the marble they clearly need, or scoring a city before they do.
Once familiar, Carrara plays pretty fast. But there will be pauses when people are forced to come up with a Plan B.
It's not chess, but The Palaces of Carrara is a game that demands things of you: calculating your plans whilst keeping track of what the other players are up to. Those end-game conditions turn it into a tense race!
Carrara comes with an 'advanced' game so once you know the basics you can mix these in. We feel the base game has a lot of replayability already!
2-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
I've a real blind spot in games when you have two different ways to score; Tigris and Euphrates does a similar thing and, like Carrara, I get bamboozled, despite the simple rules. But that's my downfall, not the games'. Unusually for a strategy game, Carrara can have surprise endings courtesy of those victory conditions; the fact someone can suddenly announce they've won laces the play with tension. It's worth checking out all the games of Kiesling and Kramer - we rate them highly at GNG.