The Little Prince

[jungleboy]

One of the things my wife gave me for Christmas was the game The Little Prince, or El Principito as we call it, since we have the Spanish version (which she bought while I was playing in the Carcassonne tournament in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago).

This is a basic but fun game based on the famous book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My wife is not a game player in general and won't play Carcassonne, but we have played the Little Prince a couple of times and she won both times and enjoyed it.

The idea of the game is that each player creates their own planet of 16 tiles. Twelve of the 16 tiles are planet tiles which include things from the book like lamp posts, sheep, snakes, baobabs etc. The other four tiles are 'personajes' (characters) from the book who determine your points. For example, one of these characters gives you a point for every lamp post you have on your planet. Another gives you seven points for one baobab on your planet and 14 for two. The way the tile distribution works allows you to choose one out of several tiles (depending on the number of players) in each round to create your planet, so you want to choose tiles that complement the character tiles you already have and/or try to block other players from being able to choose tiles that complement the character tiles they already have.

The game only takes 20-25 minutes so it's a short and fun game even for non-gamers (especially if you know and like the book, otherwise it's all a bit random). My wife likes it because if she doesn't want to worry about the points she doesn't have to and she can just make a nice planet. In this way it's a very family friendly game with almost no possible aggression and not much depth of strategy. It's a good introduction to tile-laying games and it's nice that the two of us can play a game together (finally).

Here is the BGG page for The Little Prince if you want to find out more.

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