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This pure negotiation game pits the players as Renaissance era families that are engaging in rampant nepotism. Players are seeking positions in the other families' businesses, and to further that pursuit players offer bribes. However, once accepting a bribe, the 'bought' player is under absolutely no obligation to honor the highest briber or any other verbal deal. In a word, this game is vicious.
The new AMIGO edition came out in 2005.
The main difference between the F.X. Schmid and the AMIGO versions are that the the F.X. Schmid version uses five houses/buildings per player, with values of 1,2,3,5, and 10, but the AMIGO version uses four buildings/houses per player, with values of 1,3,6, and 10. Accordingly, the F.X. Schmid version has five professions - knight, merchant, lawyer, writer, and clergy - but the AMIGO version retains only clergy and writer, and adds chemist and doctor.
- Mean by explicit architectural design.
- No agreement is binding.
- There is no penalty for breaking the agreement.
- The game strips negotiation down to its most mercenary possible level.
- Wealthy families placing scholars at palaces to generate income
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Bribery — The mechanism for deciding who gets placed where is bribery and promises.
- negotiation — Players offer in-game money to secure placement of their scholars.
- take that — Players receiving bribes can take the money and place whoever they want.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a game table when somebody realizes they have just been completely, deliberately, and systematically destroyed by somebody they trusted.
- Mean games are a genre unto themselves.
- The person sitting across from them smiled, played their cards just right, and had been planning it for three rounds.
- The sea serpent player maintained eye contact and smiled the whole time.
- You were never trying to save us.
- I was always trying to save myself.
- That is a different thing. It is, in fact, exactly what Nemesis is designed to produce.
- Everything is negotiable.
- The elected pope controlled by a player can excommunicate opponents.
- The traitor system is the knife at the game's heart.
- I held that card for two hours.
- That is why you committed everything.
- It is the meanest game ever designed because it is the only major board game where the primary mechanic is human trust and the primary strategy is its violation.
- Attack the east on this move and I will allow you three supply centers.
- That is diplomacy.
- This is showing me things about markets I did not want to understand.
- Since round one.
- The worst part was understanding that it had never been a competition. It had been a lesson on a schedule the teacher set before the first card was played.