Saint Petersburg

'Cause who doesn't want to push around some serfs?

Overall score:

There is just something about Germans and great board games. For a country that lost two world wars you’d think their strategy gaming skills would be a little iffy. Yet somehow Germany got the company of Hans im Glück, which produces some of the best games in the industry. Their games come to the United States by way of the Rio Grande Games company which invested wisely in translators.

One of the relatively recent games to come out of Germany is Saint Petersburg. It a card-driven board game where the players get to play Czar for a while as each player tries to be the one to build the city of Saint Petersburg. In real life, building Saint Petersburg was a miserable process that caused untold suffering. The game version is a lot more fun. Maybe Peter the Great should have thought of this before sending all those poor serfs to work.

Using counterfeit rubles and a number of card decks, the game is played in a series of rounds. Each round consist of a number of phases: the worker phase, the building phase, the aristocrat phase, and the trading phase. During the appropriate phase players employ workers, purchase buildings, bribe aristocrats or trade. All these activities require the players to spend rubles to get cards from one of for decks of cards: the worker deck, the building deck, the aristocrat deck, and the trading deck. All of this activity helps players gain money and points towards victory. When the last card in on one of the card decks is drawn, the game ends with the player with the most points declared the victor.

So that is an overly simplistic version of the game. As you can probably tell, the game is actually more complicated than mentioned above. Once players get started, however, it becomes rather apparent how the game is played and the competition quickly heats up. The game requires a lot of strategy, particularly the ability to think ahead to you next move (or several moves) and anticipate the moves of your opponents. The order that players take turns changes during each phase depending on lots drawn at the start of play. Paying careful attention to when each player is about to act is necessary. Also, money is tight during play. You don’t start out with a lot rubles and it takes some big sacrifices to make more money. Even by the end of the game, few players will have spare money.

The learning curve for starting play is a little high, but not excessively. Once the game gets going it doesn’t take long to become entrenched in plotting your next more. For strategists this game is a lot of fun, though it may not have the enduring appeal of games like Risk. For the casual board game player, this game is also enjoyable; although it may require more use of mental energies than some casual gamers care to invest.

Overall, Saint Petersburg gives everyone a great time building the city of Saint Petersburg, unless you happen to be a serf living in early eighteenth-century Russia.

Saint Petersburg requires two to four players. It is recommended that players be at least age ten or older. An average game takes about an hour to two hours to play.

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Written by 42 on March 12th, 2007