Pax Renaissance

Let me say it plainly: I don’t love Pax Renaissance. Another unbearable creation from the deranged master Phil, at least for me. I’d heard good things and picked it up, and Fotis had already played three or four games and liked it, so we decided to give it a chance. We read up on it, Fotis worked himself to the bone explaining it, and we even had player aids in front of us — and I still understood almost nothing.

The game spreads so many different things out in front of you that I never managed to grasp what exactly I was supposed to be pursuing. The five different conflict types in particular felt like excessive baggage: rather than clarifying my options, they made every situation feel like a new little rules lesson. Turn after turn, I never built a strategy; I was simply trying not to get lost.

And the interaction did not give me a reason to persist. The cards and conflicts are presumably where players become entangled with one another, but I experienced them more as noise made up of exceptions and unclear priorities. At some completely random point I won because it was Friday, or at least that is what it felt like, and the only certain thing was that my head hurt by the end.

I don’t know how anyone can enjoy games like this, but de gustibus. A fairly hard pass from me. Maybe the same game, without the five conflict types and with a little more balance in the cards, could have seemed good to me. As I experienced it, though: nope, nope, nope.