Peloponnes Card Game Review

If there were ever a film made about the Marquis de Sade, I think I know who would be able to write the script: Bernd Eisenstein, the designer of Peloponnes: The Card Game. Only a sadist of the highest order could possibly develop a game so utterly miserable for the inhabitants of the game’s setting, because this game is inarguably the single most sadistic game I’ve ever played. The entire game seems to be hell-bent on making players’ lives as frustrating as possible by delivering card after card of cruelly difficult decisions and inconceivably bad news. If you are not a masochist, read no further, because this game may be too much for you to bear.

The idea of the game is that you play one of several nascent, ancient civilizations who just want to build, thrive, and develop into happy, mostly peaceful places for the citizens to live. The game itself has very different ideas. It wants them to suffer immeasurably, like an evil child who revels in burning ants with a magnifying glass. You see, there are five catastrophes that will happen during every single play and players’ options to survive any of them are purposefully limited in such a way that they would be very fortunate to defend against even one or two of them, primarily because all the other players are trying to do the same thing. The cards which allow their civilizations to ignore the cataclysms are both randomly drawn and exceedingly limited. Thus, you can expect your little wards to die painful, miserable deaths at the hands of earthquakes, plagues, storms, draughts, and societal decline. While the game’s goal is, on its sleeve, to earn more points than your adversaries in at least one of the two categories of points, the true, underlying, unspoken goal, is to simply not die and wither as much as the next guy.

If I had to characterize the play itself using only one adjective, it would have to be “dry”. The game is played over eight highly procedural turns, there’s very little player interaction other than taking cards that someone else might desire. Much like Agricola, you’re much more concerned with simply building your own little civilization and not being devastated by the calamities than with messing up your opponents. Each turn is spent bidding upon and buying cards to add to your tableau which provide you population or income of several types. These cards also bring the cataclysms closer as they have an icon on the top of many which indicate which type will be taken one step closer toward occurring. Many cards also provide you parts of the ancient equivalent of a Patriot missile battery, used to defend against one of them. Each cataclysm has its own track, so you can see which one is more likely to occur in future turns, so the only real player interaction is having protection against a catastrophe, and buying a card which triggers it, thereby laying waste to your opponents while you sit back and smirk as their people, buildings, and resources are swamped, swallowed by the earth, or otherwise laid waste to.

Most of the drama between players occurs during the bidding phase of turns; the cards are hotly contested, generally, and there’s a delicate balance kept by the system because many cards are built using one or more of the several types of resources, so you can’t just build an economic engine and try to buy your way to victory without first developing an production engine to support the purchase of cards. Additionally, because victory is achieved not by how well you did in your best category, but how well you did in your worst, you can’t expect to win with a high population but low renown. In fact, I’d argue that the greatest strength of this game is that you’re forced to build a well-balanced society if you wish to win, and the game’s design is such that doing so is very, very difficult. Because each catastrophe damages different aspects of your civilization, you must also spend your scant turns developing some defenses against the ones that will affect you worst, if possible, because you can go from leader to long-shot so easily when one occurs.

The first time I played, I did so just after its Essen release, and with one of the most well-known game designers of all time. He liked it a lot, and I did not like it even a little. But since then, I’ve begrudgingly played it several more times, and I’ve found it grew on me quite a bit more than I ever imagined it would. I still think it’s too dry a game for my tastes, but I greatly appreciate the tremendous feelings of hopelessness and despair that the design provides. I can’t remember ever playing a game so bleak, but the bleakness also keeps you on edge for the entire ride, making it a very tense experience. Check out the rules, see if the play style suits you and if so give it a shot. Like I said, it’s brutal, and if you can handle brutality, then you may like it quite a lot.