Council of Verona – as seen on Tabletop – is a quick, light filler card game where you’re all nobles who’ve noticed how the citizens of Verona are all so sick of that whole Montague vs. Capulet thing, so you’re making a council in the hopes that’ll help keep everything under control. Really though, you’re just leveraging the feud, your noble rivals, and the council, to increase your influence in the city. It’s fun and takes only a few minutes to play.
You draft some cards, keeping some for yourself and passing others to your opponents.
At least one card will be removed from play without anyone seeing it.
Play couldn’t be simpler. Place one of your cards (there’s only 17 in the game) in the Council or Exile, use that card’s ability if you like, then decide if you’d like to place an influence token (numbered 0, 3, 5 – plus an 4 in the 2-player game). That’s it.
The key, though, is that the influence tokens you’re placing are face down, and can be on any card that’s been played. Romeo and Juliet don’t care if they’re on the Council or Exiled, as long as they’re together. Aww. Heads of the Capulet and Montague households want more of their people on the Council than the house. And the neutral Prince just wants an even Council or several Neutral people on the Council. Poor guy. He’s just trying to run the city. Meanwhile, Mercutio’s sick of everything and just wants more people Exiled than on the Council.
You can throw your lot in with any one (or several) of these people and their agendas. You play your influence tokens face down, so it may look like you’re rooting for the lovers, but you’ve really given Romeo your 0 token, and don’t want them to get together. Doing this could fool others to add their more valuable influence tokens to that card, thinking they’ll be riding your coattails.
So there’s a bit of guess work to suss out whether your opponents actually want to see the agenda succeed, for the card they’ve just placed a token on, or if it’s misdirection.
Add into that a few cards that let you look at our even swap placed influence tokens, and suddenly that tricksey 0 you placed gets swapped with your 5 and your whole game plan changes.
It’s a very quick game, nice card art – though that box cover is a bit weird – and the second edition comes with the Poison Expansion, which – very thematically – gives every player a Poison and an Antidote token that look just like the influence tokens. Any character with more Poison than Antidote at the end, is killed an their influence along with them.
This game’s great for when you want to play something, but don’t have too much time. Interesting decisions, but nothing too complicated. While they play very differently, and there’s certainly room in your game library for both, Council of Verona reminds me a bit of Love Letter, with the noble theme, deduction, some cards being removed, and trying to outfox your opponents. And it plays so quickly you may find yourself playing it several times in a row, like we did.
Playing Off the Tracks 