Pax Renaissance

Disclaimer: This short review does not attempt to provide a thorough rules explanation. For that, I would suggest this video. All I'm interested in exploring when I write about board games is WHY I like games, and HOW they make me feel. As such, this review is sparse on rules information and heavy on me trying to explain why this game feels cool to play. If you are looking for an "objective" take on the game's pros and cons, there are other great reviews here. I believe all forms of art are subjective, and that applying a numerical value to them is inappropriate unless only attempting to convey a subjective desire to engage with the object. Under those parameters, Pax Ren is a 10/10 for me.

Pax Renaissance is a tableau builder.

But it's a PAX game, so of course, it's much more than that -- but at its core, Pax Renaissance is about purchasing cards from a market, and playing those cards to your tableau. The cards you play to your tableau will provide you with actions and allow you to manipulate the board state in ways that will secure your chance of victory.

Thematically, in Pax Renaissance we play as powerful bankers, using our money to manipulate the world around us. Of course, we want to come out on top -- and we will fully take for granted that these swings of arrogance come at the expense of others. Our money will fund holy wars, conspiracies, revolutions, beheadings, and military campaigns -- and we will count our riches in the background.

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Pax Renaissance features a map centred on the Mediterranean Sea. The map stretches from England to Egypt. On that map, 3 factions -- Muslims, Catholics, and Reformists -- exercise control over different regions.

Through the purchasing and playing of cards from a central market, players will manipulate these factions, causing their control to ebb and flow, and carve out new frontiers. Some games may see the Islamic kingdoms taking over Europe - others might see political infighting and revolutions in England and France - still, others might see globalization and trade prevail in the face of beheadings, and violent regime change.



There are two decks of cards in this game -- an East and a West deck. In each deck, there are two comet cards seeded into the bottom portion. When these cards flip into the market, players are able to purchase them and activate any of the 4 victory conditions. This takes careful consideration, because activating a victory condition doesn't mean you claim victory. Activating a victory condition means that you just gave everyone else at the table an equal chance to snatch that victory out of your hands.

There are 4 victory conditions in Pax Renaissance. They are Renaissance Victory, Globalization Victory, Imperial Victory, and Holy Victory. I'll give a brief breakdown of each victory condition -- because it will give you a decent overview of what a player can accomplish during a game of Pax Renaissance.

Renaissance Victory: To win the Renaissance victory, a player needs to have a republic under their control. A republic can be created by a successful vote within a monarchy. Several straw-man attacks on your own kingdoms, including peasant revolts will also flip your kingdom from a monarchy into a republic. Renaissance Victory also requires the player to have more "Law prestige" than any other player

Globalization Victory: Globalization victory requires a player to have more concessions than any other player and also more "Discovery Prestige". Concessions are put out in a few ways, but mostly when a successful regime change happens. I assume this represents your interests being secured by the new power-that-be - in exchange for your financing their armies and intelligence networks.

Imperial Victory: Simple, have more Monarchies under your control than any other player. Monarchies can be controlled through many regime-change events, including Coronations, Campaigns, and Holy Wars.

Holy Victory: This one is a little more complicated, it requires a player to have more prestige in the dominant religion - which means more pieces of that faction exist within their own theocracies (theocracies are created through successful Holy Wars)



What do I think?

The eschewal of victory points in favour of specific win conditions means Pax Renaissance can narrow its focus. It is a battle over a few specific things, and the consequence of this means that Pax Renaissance becomes a tense, zero-sum game, where one player's advantage is often an active disadvantage to everyone else at the table. This way of entangling player objectives and forcing them to fight -- directly -- over the things that matter to them, creates a much more satisfying way to secure victory than "whoever has the most points". Pax Renaissance is a battle of wits, not of optimization.

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Pax Renaissance does something else I really love in games: it provides an emergent narrative that is generated by player actions, not by flipping over cards with events on them, or by consulting page 50 paragraph 5 in a tome of pre-scripted encounters. Everything that happens in Pax Renaissance happens because the game gives you the proper tools to do so. Whether you use them or not, and to what effect you use them is up to the players. The result is a narrative that will never be replicated, and to me, this has an effect similar to games like Agricola or Underwater Cities. In farming games and city builders, even if you do poorly, there's satisfaction in looking at your board -- at the thing you've created. In Pax Renaissance, it's less of a thing, but the feeling is still there. The history that you create is impactful.

And at the centre of all of this is just... cards. Cards that you buy from a market. The fact that such a simple mechanism can give birth to an experience like this is nothing short of incredible. The cards are everything. Each one is unique and, in certain circumstances, profoundly game-changing.

And there is an inherent drama in the cards that is impossible not to love... When the comet cards that are seeded into the deck flip, there is always a feeling like the table gasps. Everyone has to, very quickly, take stock of their current position, and re-evaluate their goals -- and their opponent's goals. When the comet cards come out, you might suddenly need to pivot your strategy. It might mean abandoning what you've been working on in order to deny your opponent the win. Much like other games in the Pax Series -- and also, the COIN series -- the flipping of these pre-seeded cards creates a dramatic tension that looms over the tempo - an eschatological spectre dragging victory on a rope.



Pax Renaissance is a game of eking out advantages. About controlling the tempo, and taking risks in order to secure your position, even if it's only one rung up the ladder.

It's a game of point and counter-point, a theme that the game explores with several dichotomies: East and West, Republic and Monarchy, Tolerance and Fundamentalism -- but, despite what the footnotes in the rulebook might present, how Pax Renaissance handles these dichotomies is more dialogic than dialectic - there is no synthesis of ideas here, no happy ending, but a fluid exchange of ideas that serve to explore our concept of power, and how it influences the world around us.

But most importantly: the game is very fun. When your opponent seizes control of the Ottoman Empire only to be hit with a behead card that kills his King and leaves the empire in a weakened state, it's not only funny, but it feels good. It scratches that schadenfreude itch, like the way you might imagine a civilization game does. But in its essence, Pax Renaissance is an anti-civ game. And as much as Phil Eklund might hate this, Pax Renaissance feels like a post-modern take on the civ genre. Because instead of representing England, The Ottoman Empire, or the Papal States, we represent a rhizomatic web of interests in a world that is deeply entangled by our meddling.