In Courtisans you play the role of an attendee at the Queen’s banquet. What’s on the menu? Hors d’oeuvres of influence & backstabbing, followed by a main course of skullduggery and shenanigans. Come, gorge yourself on the feast of fun this small box brings to your table too.

At its core, Courtisans is a very simple game. In the middle of the table is the cloth ‘board, which represents the Queen’s table. It’s separated into seven sections: one per noble family, and a middle section where spies go – more on this later. For every one of your turns you’ll find yourself holding three cards – each in a different suit, and all you have to do is play all three. One goes to the area in front of you, one goes to another player’s area (your choice), and the final one goes to the Queen’s table.

The last of these is the most interesting. If you play the card above the Queen’s table next to a particular family (each family has a colour/icon), you’re essentially voting to make that family esteemed. Play it below the table, and you’re trying to drag them down to be fallen from grace. At the end of the game, a family with more cards above than below is esteemed, more below than above is fallen from grace, and a tie means they’re neither. They’re the Switzerland of Courtisans – neutral.

Role-playing

If that all sounds interesting but bland, you’re right. Things would very quickly get deadlocked. Luckily there are lots of cards which have different roles in the game to spice things up. Nobles are worth two cards each, which can be huge. Assassins let you kill a card in the area in which you play it, regardless of whether it’s yours, the Queen’s table, or another player’s area, upsetting the balance of power. Guards, however, cannot be killed. Once they’re in place, they never move. Finally, you have the most interesting of the lot – Spies.

Spies are placed face-down, regardless of where you play it. If you play it to the Queen’s table, you play it to the centre, which isn’t assigned to any particular family. It’s played either above or below, so you know it’ll pull or push a family’s credibility, but you don’t know which family until the end of the game when the cards get revealed.

Scoring at the end of the game is easy. You count the cards around the Queen’s table and see which families are esteemed and which have fallen from grace. For every card you have matching the suits of esteemed families you gain a point, and for every fallen from grace family you lose a point. There’s one final twist of the knife where each player has two secret objectives, each of which is worth 3 VPs. What’s great about these are that they require players to do things like make sure certain families have fallen from grace, or to have more of a particular family than a neighbour, etc.

Quite a looker

The most obvious thing that sets Courtisans apart from many of its small-box peers is the quality of the production. The cards are long, tarot-size cards with beautiful inlaid gold on every one of them. The cardstock is thick and nice to handle (although those long cards are always awkward to shuffle). The little cloth board is a really cute touch, as it so easily could have been a plain old cardboard board instead. Yes, it’s a bit annoying that it never lies flat straight out of the box, but it’s so cute there on the table.

One of the best things about the game is its small footprint. Even though each player has their own tableau in front of them, you can stack and splay cards of each suit, just so there’s enough visible so that everyone knows how many of each card each other player has. I’ve played this on small tables in bars, on a desk, on a table in the corner of a shop, and the fact that I can makes it perfect for what it is. An interactive, clever game that only takes 15 minutes to play. It makes it the perfect ‘between games’ or ‘waiting for the food to arrive’ game.

Final thoughts

What can I say that I haven’t already? Courtisans has been a hit with every person I’ve introduced it to, which is coming close to 20 people now. It’s so easy to explain, and despite your turn being so simple – play three cards to three places – it’s surprisingly tactical. I was a little worried at first that the Assassin cards would alienate some people, because some folk hate take-that in a game, but so far it’s been a non-issue. I think it’s because it feels less personal and less invasive than in other games. You can’t be certain you haven’t helped someone out by killing a card from in front of them.

The small box means you can take it pretty much anywhere. It tucks into the small gaps in my backpacks which means it’s a convention and games night mainstay for me now. It’s always there, just in case, and because it’s so fast and so enjoyable, it invariably gets played a lot. If there’s a gap for a quick, interactive game in your collection, I heartily recommend Couritsans. It’s great.

You can buy Courtisans from my retail partner, Kienda, right here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Courtisans (2024)

Design: Romaric Galonnier, Anthony Perone
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Art: Noëmie Chevalier
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Courtisans Review appeared first on Punchboard.

In the game, five empires are vying for control of the map. You might think you take control of these empires, but no, it’s far more conspiratorial. Instead, the players take the roles of leaders of a secret society, pulling the strings and betting on the outcome of the war. When the game ends, and the dust settles on the battlefield, if the horse (or empire, in this case) you backed is big-daddy-boss-bollocks, you’re in with a chance of winning. What makes it all the more juicy is the fact that each player’s affiliations are secret, and revealed at the very end.

Spicy!

Round trip

One of the most distinctive things about A War Of Whispers is the circular board. There aren’t too many games that do this these days, so it really stands out from a design perspective. One of the things I really like about the game is the way the shape of the board is integrated into the design. Each of the warring empires has an area around the side of the board with four slots, representing its council. Each council slot is essentially an action space, like in a worker-placement game. Thematically, this is great, because on your turn you’re placing agents into each council, influencing the direction in which that empire is going to build and grow.

It makes me feel like Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of The Rings.

The order of play moves around the board from the start space, through each council seat in each empire in turn, which makes it really obvious what’s going to happen, and in which order. At first it doesn’t seem like it matters too much, but by the end of your first game you’ll realise how important the order that the empires are activated, is really significant. Banners are added to the board, farms & forts get built, and battles fought.

Thankfully, combat is very simple. You just compare the strength of the attacking and defending forces, take into account any cards played, and remove banners to reflect the outcome. The empire with the most banners in a region controls any city that might be there, and it’s control of the cities which matters when the dust settles, and the final scores tallied.

Ulterior motives

The secrecy of each player’s affiliations is what makes A War of Whispers shine so brightly. There are five slots on each player’s personal board, each with a different value of multiplier. They range from zero to four, and another which actually gives a negative multiplier for that empire’s control. At the start of the game, each person’s affiliations are random, and placed face-down. There’s a lot of checking them for the first ten minutes while you try to remember which colour you have in which place.

As soon as the game starts, you can almost hear the collective cogs turning in brains around the table, as they form their diabolical machinations. You’ll find your first instinct is to play it cool. Don’t make it obvious you really want yellow to win, for example. The trouble is, the rest of the table is doing the same thing. So then you might think “Okay, let’s get clever. I’m going to go all-in on my preferred colour, and let them think I secretly want another.” And as sure as day follows night, that double bluff turns into a triple bluff, and then a quadruple. In one game I played, I’d convinced myself I wanted to red to win, and ended up bluffing myself out until it was too late to do anything about it. High IQ play, I’m sure you’ll agree.

If you’ve got this far in the review, it probably sounds like cloak-and-dagger and secrecy is the only way to go. A War Of Whispers has one more really fun trick up its tunic’s sleeves. At the end of any of the first three rounds (the game finishes after the fourth) you can choose to swap any two of your loyalty tokens’ places. If you do, they stay face-up – and therefore public knowledge – until the end of the game. With the cat out of the bag, and the dirty laundry aired, things can get very interesting.

Final thoughts

I really, really like A War Of Whispers, and it’s going to stay in my collection for a long time. The way it manages to wrap-up the intrigue of something like A Game of Thrones, and throw it into a game that only takes an hour (once you’ve learned the game) is fantastic. It’s an easy teach which relies on the interactions of the players to create some fantastic tension and raised eyebrows. It’s at its best with three of four players, two-player can just get a bit swingy.

There’s so much subtle stuff going on in the game which rewards repeated play. The way the various empires seem the same, but knowing that differences in the map mean you have to approach the game slightly differently, is subtle, but clever. The card-play doesn’t feel that important at first, but rewards experimentation.

Some people don’t like games where you’ve no idea who’s winning until the end of the game, so I can see this being a turn-off for them. To go into A War Of Whispers like that is to miss the point of the game. It’s an hour of ludological foreplay, leading up to a knee-trembling climax, which hopefully doesn’t result in disappointment for you.

(Note to self – choose better analogies in the future.)

A War Of Whispers is a streamlined, fabulous piece of design. It’s brilliant, and up there with El Grandé and Brian Boru as my favourite area control games.

Review copy kindly provided by Starling Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

A War Of Whispers (2019)

Designer: Jeremy Stoltzfus
Publisher: Starling Games
Art: Tomasz Jedruszek, Dann May
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-60 mins

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