Characters in La Stanza

Two weeks after announcing La Stanza and providing some first insights in the game play, we will go more in depth. Today, we take a closer look at the lower part of the player board; how to hire characters and what do they bring you in the game?

Each turn, you must move your player figure on the game board (more on how that looks in a future post) 1 to 4 spaces and pick the character tile the figure lands on. This tile is put on the leftmost space of your recruitment track (the top row shown in the picture above). If that space is already occupied, slide tiles to the right in order to make room for the new character. A character tile that “falls out” is discarded.

After moving and taking a character tile, you can either choose to receive money (more on that in a future post), simply pass, but more importantly: Take ONE action. If the player decides to take one action, it must normally match the discipline of the room in which your figure is located. Furthermore, you must hire at least one character of the appropriate discipline, even if you already have one on your worker track (the bottom row shown in the picture above). To hire a character, move its tile from your recruitment track to any spot on your worker track and pay the hiring cost indicated above that spot. Hiring a character will typically result in another character becoming displaced. Thereafter, the number of characters in the associated discipline determines your action strength, thus what the action brings you!

The sharp-eyed among you did presumably already spot this ;), but the character art wasn’t created by the same artist. We hired five different artists to illustrate the characters in La Stanza, one for each of the disciplines. In this way, each discipline got their own style and feel, while maintaining unity by using the same background and graphic design. From left to right in the picture above, these disciplines are Art, Discoveries, Politics, Religion and Literature. These illustrations were created (again from left to right) by Luka Arh, Sebastien Caiveau, Loïc Billiau, José van den Helder and Kevin Hill.

That is it for the preview of today. Next time, we will show you the main game board and discuss how to receive money and acquire Prestige Points, which will eventually win you the game :D.