The Prodigals Club Review

You are born into wealth and a respectable family in Victorian England. You own great possessions, are graced with societal esteem, and your father has paid just enough people to ensure your election to office. Yes, your whole life is planned out and you’re expected to live it as a gentleman should. Well, nuts to that!

In Prodigals Club, the players don’t want their gentrified lives planned for them and do not care to become proper gentlemen. Instead, they have formed the eponymous club with the goal to see who can lose the most respect in society, in politics, and in wealth. The player that best squanders his standing is the winner.

The game comes with three independent boards. The Standard game plays with any two of society, voting, or possessions. Players can also opt to include all three. While it is fully functional with two, experienced gamers are going to want the full three-board experience. As the game progresses, players try to annoy potential voters, disrespect the influential in society, and lose as many assets as possible. The game ends after five rounds and each person has a score in each category. The highest of their scores becomes their end-game score. The player with the lowest end game score wins the game.

When I first approached Prodigals Club, I was worried that it would play out as so many little mini-games. That would have been alright, but given its pedigree (it’s the successor to the excellent Last Will) and the playtime on the box, mini-games would not have satisfied. Luckily, such is not the case. While the three boards are conceptually distinct, the central board connects each of them. It has cards that specifically play to the combination of boards in your game. Plus, the game relies on you acquiring (and losing) symbols of various kinds. Many such symbols are common to all three boards, which allows for significant crossover. So, maybe I have a possession that gives me a carriage symbol, and an elections card that allows me to lose a vote for every carriage symbol I have.

Even though they play off one another, the three boards each have their own personality. On the Election Board, players will try to be the loudest and most obnoxious. There’s a competition for megaphones each round with the loudest losing votes and the least loud gaining a vote. Meanwhile, on the Society Board, players attempt to make fools of themselves. But kindly old Dame Beatrice, who has known you since you were an infant, does her best to mollify the offended and repair your reputation.

Each round, the various boards are seeded with tiles and cards. Then, in turn order, players send their errand boys to the various locations to pick up the cards and tiles, or make use of one-time benefits. After all the cards or abilities have been acquired, players can play as many as they want. Many cards offer symbols or have greater effects depending on the number of symbols present. In politics, for example, some cards let you lose more votes when you say something scandalous to the Conservative party, while others respond more negatively to Liberal party offenses.

It’s clear that the gameplay owes a lot to Last Will. They both use errand boys and have cards that come out each round, plus a personal tableau. Fortunately, Prodigals Club entirely ejects the action mechanic from Last Will and focuses the game more on card play. And, while they remain different games, the truly adventurous can substitute the entire Last Will game for the Possessions Board of Prodigals. While possible, and an experience worth having, doing so gets just a bit unwieldy.

In Prodigals Club, the race to the bottom is a mad dash. With only five rounds, you have precious little time to build up any kind of engine. Yet, if you hope to do well, you absolutely need to combine your actions as much as possible. Your single use cards should trigger bonuses from ongoing cards as much as possible to get the most out of them.

It’s tempting to simply grab the single use abilities on the various boards. Stopping Dame Beatrice or yelling in Hyde Park are always attractive and can force other players to rethink their plans. But doing so comes at the cost of grabbing cards and establishing an engine that you can rely on in later turns.

Further, the competition on the board is absolutely fierce. You’ll see almost every available space taken nearly every round. Turn order is a tough fight. With everything going quickly, players in last might have a difficult time. So elbowing for turn order is equally fierce.

And, while it doesn’t feel like disjointed mini-games, you will find yourself flitting from board to board trying to lose on all fronts. Just as you think you’ve got a handle on losing societal esteem, you see that you’ve been neglecting your wealth. You finally get that on a good path to the bottom and see that you’re suddenly the most well-liked player in votes. This constant review really enhances the frazzled and rushed experience of the rest of the game.

Combine the heavy competition for cards, attention being pulled in many directions, and the few available rounds, and Prodigals Club is a real treat. Still, the comparison to Last Will is inevitable. And, in fact, the games are quite distinct. Last Will is about managing actions and card draw, while also building an engine toward victory. By contrast, Prodigals Club is about building an engine, and then destroying it. But beyond that, it is also about then dealing with the aftermath.

While Last Will has a more focused feel, Prodigals Club leaves you feeling a lot more frazzled. And, unlike its predecessor, it isn’t enough to simply create one particular engine and then run it to perfection. This title is much more about swinging from challenge to challenge and managing your losses in three different areas.