Praga Caput Regni

If you like action selection, getting lost in combos, abstractly roaming through the sights and smells of Prague and finding out facts such as ‘eggs were used to build bridges’ then you have found your new next game – and a game that made me revise my opinion on Beat Your Own Score solo modes.

Praga Caput Regni
Designer: Vladimír Suchý
Publisher: Delicious Games
Released: 2020

How to Play:

Players take on the role of 'Wealthy Citizen' helping to build the city of Prague; the Old Town, Charles Bridge, St Vitus Cathedral, The Hunger Wall and more. In practice, the game revolves (literally) around an Action Crane – a rotating action selection mechanism where each turn a ‘spoke’ of the wheel can be lifted out and you choose one of the two actions printed on it, as well as getting a unique bonus based on which part of the wheel you took the action from (perhaps extra resources or victory points). Once you have finished your turn you rotate the wheel so that all of the other actions move forward one and you pop your used action tile in the first space at the top of the wheel.

Which action to choose on your turn also has a little more ‘think’ built in. Actions near the start of the wheel have a cost attached and resources are very tight in this game – preventing you from easily using the same action over and over. If you wait a while for the action you want (or need!) to move further down the wheel they will be free to take. Finally if you grab an action tile right at the end that hasn’t been taken for a while (one maybe that you didn’t feel was worth taking) then you will get some extra victory points as an incentive.

Those actions that you are choosing will allow you to:

• Gain or increase your production of Gold or Coal – key resources in the game.

• Purchase buildings (largely with gold) to be placed in the town. Area control / dominance that will gain you points and resources as well the potential to move up St Vitus Cathedral, a nice 3d track that you have to navigate vertically and horizontally in order to get points and rewards immediately as well as end of game VP.

• Purchase walls to go around your city – sort of like those building tiles but mainly paid for with coal and this time they move you around a 3D Hunger Walls instead (more immediate points and rewards and juicy end game VP on offer)

• Move along the Kings Road. Move along a path towards Charles Bridge and take a bonus. If you have picked up any eggs (yes, I said eggs) through the game then you can use one for a second bonus. Once you eventually get to the end of the Kings Road and reach Charles Bridge you will get then to choose even greater bonuses and some end of game scoring objectives as a reward.

• Make permanent ongoing improvements to your ‘City’ (basically improve the power of the actions you select from the wheel) – so for example, every time I Build having upgraded my Build action I wont just get a building but I might also get some VP or other resources too. Nice.

Along the way you are going to stumble across resources and synergies that might let you take an additional action in your turn and you are really going to want to seek these out to maximise the number of turns that you take in a game and as a result, your VP at the end.

And that’s it at its most basic. Take an action from the wheel (and its associated bonus), do the action, likely score some point salady tasting points or get resources for doing that action, turn the wheel and pop the action back in the first slot. After a pre-determined number of wheel turns the game ends and the person with the most points (as ever) wins.

Solo Headlines:

Out of the box, the solo mode isn’t particularly anything at all. After your turn you just remove the action tile that is furthest on the wheel, give the wheel a turn and move the tile to the start – you are just moving the game timer closer to the end and not much else. No interaction, no real competition for other resources or spaces on the board. I’d use it maybe for my first play through of the game to get the rules bedded in but for ongoing plays it’s a big of a shrug of the shoulders from me.

The rulebook then piques my interest by telling me that if I want a more detailed solo opponent then I can find one on the publishers website. And this is where you will find Peter Parler….

Peter isn’t a full automa that scores points – just five printable cards (or find the app on the BGG forum) and a page of rules to download. He remains a very simple beat your own score variant but at least starts to provide some competition for everything that is available to you which gives more to think about. Crucially though Peter also builds buildings and this is the thing that really lifts this solo mode for me and gives me food for thought on Beat your own Score which was something that I was previously averse to. You see Peter isn’t just taking things away from me and frustrating my plans, he is adding things to the game which are giving me more options, more resources to get and previously uncompetitive spaces start to get quite delicious. His turns will take you probably less than ten seconds.

Games will likely last 60 – 75 mins (probably on the shorter end of that scale unless like me you enjoy the freedom that solo play brings to indulge in some ‘lengthy reflections’). Your aim is to try to reach 140+ points – which some may find quite easy but this solo player found / finds it quite a good challenge and one that I am no where near to regularly mastering!

General Headlines:

Having already played a couple of Vladimir Suchý designs I knew that I would be in safe hands and the game itself appealed massively to my Beige Euro Spidey Sense™. I love how in a board game market that is now crowded with contemporary modern artwork styles, games that are beige and almost medieval in the theme are now the ones that stand out and look appealing and different. And I appreciated how this one ended up being a real love letter to a place that clearly the designer has a lot of affection for. The 3D element and the huge board gives it’s a good table presence and the double layered player boards feel tactile and fun to use. Some people might take one look at the board and think ‘nope’ – I can see it being polarising. But I just fell in love at first sight with its beige goodness.

This game also made me realise that I adore Action Selection as probably my favourite mechanism. Here it is done very well using the excellent rotating wheel conceit and gives added food for thought with associated bonuses available depending on where you grab your action from. I also liked the chewiness about whether to pay for an action that is at the top of the wheel or grab an action further down for free or maybe even go for one right at the end that no one has been taking at all that now has some incentive VP attached to it. Choices and nice head hurts. Perhaps actions might even find themselves falling serendipitously alongside a bonus that brings some delightful synergies….

…and on that front, this is a game of trying to find those synergies. I love that moment where I have taken an action tile and its bonus lets me make that action even more powerful, or I place a tile that rewards me with both points now but also the ability to do something elsewhere on the board that is also going to get me even more things. The combos occasionally explode on this game and you cannot just accidentally hope that they do. Every move will require you to look at both your immediate play but also how that play might ripple and get you even more points elsewhere. Synergies and combos are what this game is all about so if you like those dopamine hits then you are in the right place but equally if you get easily lost in rules then you might struggle to remember or see how one move domino falls into others.

I appreciated that the (excellent) rulebook also gives you a lot of freedom on timings. Once you decide which action to take then the rules don’t give you a prescriptive flow that you have to follow (eg you must do A and then B and you can only do D if you have done C). Instead it gives you the freedom to try and time everything however you like to your maximum benefit. It invites me not to just take a move but to also think through the optimal use of that one move - another game that I like that does the same is Golem which explicitly tells me ‘everything on your turn or printed anywhere is optional’ which doesn’t give me less to think about, if anything it ends up giving me even more dilemmas!

Be warned that your first move is going to feel a little hesitant: In some other strategic games you might seek comfort in having some starting resources, starting objectives – just something to hone you into chasing a particular overarching strategy. Here you don’t start the game with any clear idea of what you should be doing, the game instead invites you to do anything and simply see the pathways gradually emerge. Sure enough they start to emerge but if clear ‘in this game I am working towards XY&Z’ hand holding is your usual thing then you might feel some initial wobbles. After a couple of games I felt comfortable being uncomfortable and just setting myself off on the streets of Prague and seeing what might happen.

The game feels of itself inherently replayable and enjoyable – every game I have played I have immediately felt the desire to play it again straight away. Its snappy play time contributes to this, as does the speed and ease of the solo mode and the challenge of not just of trying to beat my own score but trying to beat that target score of 140. On top of all of this the variability is immense. Main action tiles come with an A side or an asymmetric B side, the main market of available buildings, walls and upgrade tiles cycle and refresh regularly, other areas of the board have alternative set ups that mix things up. Each game everything feels at once familiar but at the same time everything feels fresh.

Praga is certainly in my Top 10 all-time games and a game that tuned me into realising my affection for action selection as well as (with Peter Parler) realising that some games work really well as beat your own score and not everything needs a point scoring automa. It also made the designer's follow up game Messina 1347 an instabuy with a review on that one no doubt to follow at some point soon.

At a glance:

+ Action Selection, lots of it, and done very well

+ Combos, Combos, Combos

+ Good play time and solo mode is a breeze.

+ The Peter Parler solo mode doesn’t just remove things from the game, it adds things which mixes the game up nicely

- solo mode out of the box isn’t good enough, you will need to print the Peter Parler cards or use the app found on the BGG forums for a decent experience.

- some might have trouble with not having clear strategies to follow at the start of the game.

Final score:

9 out of 10 (but only with the Peter Parler solo mode, it’s a must).

Reviewed after 18 plays.