Like many things worth doing, Pax Renaissance, a Phil Eklund game, is demanding. The detailed rules, festooned with fascinating footnotes, don’t do themselves any favors. It’s hard to cull from all that text any idea of what you’re supposed to do, and it’s even harder to present to people who want to play without reading a Phil Eklund rules book. You have to love rules to learn this game, and you have to love learning rules to play this game. Whereas I wouldn’t normally write a boardgame review by describing gameplay, that’s what I’m going to do here. It’s the only way I can explain how so much historical detail informs a boardgame that isn’t a detailed historical simulation.
Once a card is put into play, you’re a puppet master pulling its strings. One of the options on your turn is to run through all the cards in your tableau, using each card for one of its special actions. Mechanically, these actions are simple. Take a piece off the board, get a coin, make another player discard a card, that sort of thing. Usually this is how you set up favorable conditions for whatever upheaval you want to introduce with the cards you’ll play later.
Each card is named after a specific slice of history. A dense clot of text elaborates. A third of a card’s real estate is reserved for period artwork. Most of them also have a postage stamp sized space in the lower left corner for a unique seal or coat of arms. Eklund’s cards tend to be crammed with detail, but they make room for art. If they’re busy, it’s because they also want to show you something.
The iconography is clear and simple. You never have to read text to figure out what a card does. Too many games with cards use the cards to spill out rules exceptions that you won’t notice unless you’re reading the text. Oh, you mean I can’t attack that card on every third turn unless I’m using orange mana? Yep, sure enough, it says so right there in small print! Cards often double as additional pages in the rules book. This is never the case in Pax Renaissance. Everything a card on the table does is presented in clear, simple, and consistent iconography.
A common ability on cards is “siege”, which just means “take a piece off the board”. Five of the nine cards specific to France include the siege action. When these cards are in your tableau, you can simply take one of the pieces off France. Kill it, basically. Easy. The red icon — red for a military action — shows you which pieces you can kill, which is pretty much any of them. The word “siege” is printed under the icon in case you don’t want to remember icons. But look closer. Closer. A little closer. There’s something faintly written along the right side of the icon in teensy italicized text. This is where Eklund explains the historic rationale for anything a card does. This is where he explains why these five cards can kill a piece in France.
The five cards that can siege in France are Anne of Brittany, Margaret of Anjou, Charles the Bold, Friese Freedom, and the Flanders Guild. They vary in many ways, but they all allow a siege action in France. Regardless of which card does it, you simply remove a piece. Yet Anne’s siege action, according to the tiny text, is called the
Brittany War of Independence (her marriage to the French king ended England’s claim on this patch of France), whereas Margaret’s siege action is called the
War of the Roses (basically, Game of Thrones minus white walkers, dragons, and Peter Dinklage trying to do an accent). Charles the Bold’s siege action is the
League of Public Weal, which was a group of nobles who harried French king Louis XI for years. The Friese Freedom, named for a patch of the Low Countries without ruling nobility, gets a siege action for the
Vetkopers vs. Schieringers. These were the two factions that fought for control of the area. Their names are Dutch for “fat-buyers” and “speakers”, the former named for the rich who could afford luxuries, the latter named for the poor who tried negotiations before resorting to war. In other words, Republicans vs Democrats. Finally, the Flanders Guild’s siege action is called
Salt Wars, which was an uprising against the Pope’s tax on salt. Yep, that was a thing. The Pope tried to tax salt, so some dudes in France rebelled. They were, all, “hey hey, ho ho, this tax on salt has got to go!”. The Pope’s troops crushed them. Popes used to have troops.
This is true of every action on every card. There is no card that does something just because. Every card does something because Eklund ties it to a specific historical incident or concept, indicated in tiny italicized text. And if you’re like me, these labels will send you scuttling down various rabbit holes on Wikipedia. Pax Renaissance is a warren. Simple actions discreetly illuminated with complex historical rationales.
It’s all complicated, but for good reason. Pax Renaissance wants a peasant rebellion to work differently than a jihad, which works differently than a royal marriage, which is nothing like forming a representative republic. The specifics vary wildly, as you can tell by referencing the overly complicated chart on the back of the rules. There are better ways to express the rules differences. Teaching people how to play will require figuring out one of those better ways. Maybe even making your own charts.
It helps to keep in mind that all the actions resulting from putting a card into play have the same result: someone new is in charge. Regime change, as the rules call it. The overall conceit of Pax Renaissance is that these regime changes are effected by medieval banking families, each played by one of the players. The banking family that reaches a victory condition first wins. It’s a bit silly, frankly. All this elaborate historical detail to recreate how the Medicis engineered the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Shi’a Islam, and the discovery of a trade route around the Cape of Good Hope? I missed that part of history class, and I can’t find it on Wikipedia.
But it gets to the point Eklund is making in Pax Renaissance, which is a historical essay and not an orrery. For all its intricate specificity, this is not a clockwork approximation of the medieval world a la Paradox’s strategy games. Instead, it’s suggesting an idea, expressed through gameplay abstraction. The proposition is that bankers dragged civilization out of the Dark Ages toward the Enlightenment. As more capital flowed into a region, money and therefore power was put into the hands of people other than rulers backed by armies. This shift in balance upended feudalism and paved the way for the rule of law, patronage of the arts, and the exploration of the world. This is vividly realized as each game unfolds. As trade and money flow across the map, guided by players’ banks, history unfurls as surely as the row of cards drawn from the deck. Ruling classes swell and overfill. Peasants morph into a formidable middle class. Pax Renaissance, a paean to progress and wealth, suggests that money doesn’t just make the world go ’round. It also makes the world go forward.