The Court of Miracles Review

Win back 16th century Paris with the help of some scrappy beggars.

The Court of Miracles set in Paris hundreds of years ago is an interesting take on area control. You are the leader of a guild of beggars and you are trying to win renown from the penniless king. This is accomplished by controlling as much of the map as possible when he reaches the end of his path or when a player has placed their 6th renown token. On your turn, you will place one of your rogues face down on an empty space on the map and do the action of the area. This can be earning you money, new cards, or even more powerful tokens. After an area has been filled with pieces or if the king forces one, a standoff begins and the player with the highest value wins that area and will place a renown token and they will benefit from that region as long as they control it.

The Good: The first thing that anyone is going to notice is how gorgeous the art is for this game. The board is shaped like the Millennium Falcon and I really appreciate that. The art on the cards is also really well done. The game has a very small rulebook that lays out everything that the game has to offer and spells it out in terms that are easy to teach. If you've been reading my reviews for a while now you'll know how much I love that. I'm horrible at teaching. The "combat" is done in a really nice way as well. You do not know what your opponents have place so it's not a guarantee that you'll win the area you want.

The Okay: I wish that there was more actions that you could do. A lot of the spaces were redundant I felt. It was largely just add your piece, collect some money or a card, or move the king. Obviously the meat and potatoes of it is to control that area but I didn't see much incentive to go after certain ones if they didn't benefit me overall.

The Not So Good: If you are only planning to play this with two players, I would probably pass on this one. Because each area has 3 spots they're unlikely to fill up for a standoff and if they are, it's not very interesting because one player is always going to have more pieces than the other. There's cards that you can play to help but to me it got stale quickly. If you are going for a 2 player game, I would recommend something like 878 Vikings.

Overall: 7/10

The Court of Miracles is a really nice game that can be played relatively quickly with fantastic artwork. I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed the art. Seriously, it's beautiful. The gameplay is also really simple with a lot of strategy and trickery (at higher player counts). I would absolutely recommend it if you have the group for it.

Thanks to Lucky Duck for sending me a copy of this to try out.