Princes is a medium-weight strategy game that leverages elements of tableau-building, light negotiation, and a unique “odds manipulation” bag-building mechanism. Players take on the roles of noble house scions during the Italian Renaissance, building a base of power among the four areas of social influence: the Guilds, the Church, the Nobility, and the Workers. The scions will manage an individual reputation of fear and love, and employ that reputation to recruit allies to their causes.
The unique mechanism, Reputation, consists of each player’s bag of cubes of two types, love and fear, which are added and removed based on player decisions. The reputation state is managed throughout the game in order to maximize chances of recruiting fear or love-based allies. The winner will be determined by a combination of engine-building (a tableau of allies with special abilities), managing the reputation, and completion of individual goals, all to accumulate power (victory points).